While big-city living can be fun and exciting, it can have negative impacts on quality of life as well as the environment, according to a UQ researcher.
To understand the consequences of urban living, Dr Richard Fuller, from UQ’s School of Biological Sciences, and his research partner Professor Kevin Gaston, from the University of Sheffield, characterised urban land cover from 386 European cities, which together accommodated more than 170 million people.
“As Australia’s cities continue to grow, we have an opportunity to learn from the lessons of Europe and plan appropriately for this growth,” Dr Fuller said.
Dr Fuller said urban green spaces served a number of purposes for city dwellers; possibly most important was their ability to curb the effects of climate change in cities.
“Urban green spaces help moderate the high temperatures associated with concreting a large landscape, they help absorb stormwater runoff and can help prevent catastrophic flooding,” Dr Fuller said.
“They absorb carbon dioxide and some pollutants directly from the atmosphere, particularly where trees remain.
“Green spaces can have a positive impact on physical and mental health. They can also help reduce crime levels, increase longevity, foster social cohesion and even increase property values.”
Packing lots of people into small areas had its advantages, and was often thought to be better for biodiversity, because grouping people in concentrated areas meant limiting the environmental damage to one central area, he said.
However, highly dense urban areas were fast becoming what Dr Fuller calls “biodiversity deserts”.
“Human population growth is a fundamentally important driver of the biodiversity crisis,” Dr Fuller said.
“While some environmentalists campaign for reduced human population growth, few have tried to work out the best ways of arranging people on the earth’s surface that minimises the impacts on biodiversity.”
Among key findings were cities with the lowest provision of green spaces were in southern and eastern Europe.
For example, cities such as Almeria, Spain and Reggio di Calabria in Italy had as little as three to four square meters of green space per person.
In contrast, Dr Fuller found northern and western cities like Liege, Belgium had up to 300 square meters per person.
Dr Fuller and Professor Gaston also examined the effects of urban green spaces on people and biodiversity.
The researchers have since provided this information to city councils to inform the process of maintaining, planning and developing green spaces and their positive community benefits.
The study explored the relationships between urban green space coverage and city area population size.
Dr Fuller and Professor Gaston determined that unless municipalities took specific measures to maintain access to green spaces and allocate land within cities for recreation, Europeans would continue to have increasingly limited access to formal green spaces.
As cities continued to manage the issue, planting trees along streets and support for home gardens would be important for city dwellers, they said.
On the other side of the spectrum, low-density sprawling cities with ample green space had a higher overall footprint because the city takes up a much larger area. The key is to find a balance, they said.
Jessica Sushinsky, a masters student at UQ, is currently working to discover which urban growth policies deliver least disruption to biodiversity while maintaining human quality of life in Brisbane, as the city looks to build 150,000 houses over the next 20 years.
Media: Allison Rock at UQ Office of Communications (allison.rock@uq.connect.edu.au or 07 3365 2619) or Tracey Franchi, Communications Manager School of Biological Sciences (3365 4831, t.franchi@uq.edu.au).
