Airborne assessment uncovers socioeconomic stratification of urban nature in England

Fuente: arXiv
Salvato in:
Dettagli Bibliografici
Autori principali: Zúñiga-González, Andrés Camilo, Madhavapeddy, Anil, Bardhan, Ronita
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
Soggetti:
Accesso online:
Tags: Aggiungi Tag
Nessun Tag, puoi essere il primo ad aggiungerne!!
_version_ 1866918168958599168
author Zúñiga-González, Andrés Camilo
Madhavapeddy, Anil
Bardhan, Ronita
author_facet Zúñiga-González, Andrés Camilo
Madhavapeddy, Anil
Bardhan, Ronita
contents Nature access is increasingly recognised as a public health and equity imperative, yet cities lack standardised ways to measure who benefits from green infrastructure. We present the first national, building-level assessment of the 3-30-300 urban greening rule across England, integrating high-performance computing with open LiDAR and geospatial datasets. Our framework quantifies proximity, availability, and accessibility of greenery, linking each to socioeconomic deprivation through Gini-based inequality metrics. Results reveal that while most English residents meet the tree visibility criterion, only 0.1% of urban areas meet all three thresholds; canopy cover and park access sharply diverge along deprivation lines. Wealthier areas enjoy greater ambient greenness, whereas deprived urban cores often have better proximity to parks but lower vegetation density. The study offers a scalable computational blueprint for assessing nature equity and demonstrates that green accessibility represents a new dimension of socioeconomic inequality. These findings call for policy approaches that move beyond proximity metrics toward equitable, quality-based standards for nature access.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_13861
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Airborne assessment uncovers socioeconomic stratification of urban nature in England
Zúñiga-González, Andrés Camilo
Madhavapeddy, Anil
Bardhan, Ronita
Physics and Society
Nature access is increasingly recognised as a public health and equity imperative, yet cities lack standardised ways to measure who benefits from green infrastructure. We present the first national, building-level assessment of the 3-30-300 urban greening rule across England, integrating high-performance computing with open LiDAR and geospatial datasets. Our framework quantifies proximity, availability, and accessibility of greenery, linking each to socioeconomic deprivation through Gini-based inequality metrics. Results reveal that while most English residents meet the tree visibility criterion, only 0.1% of urban areas meet all three thresholds; canopy cover and park access sharply diverge along deprivation lines. Wealthier areas enjoy greater ambient greenness, whereas deprived urban cores often have better proximity to parks but lower vegetation density. The study offers a scalable computational blueprint for assessing nature equity and demonstrates that green accessibility represents a new dimension of socioeconomic inequality. These findings call for policy approaches that move beyond proximity metrics toward equitable, quality-based standards for nature access.
title Airborne assessment uncovers socioeconomic stratification of urban nature in England
topic Physics and Society
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.13861