بهبود وضعیت طبیعت در شهرها
Abstract
1- Introduction
2- Material and methods
3- Results
4- Discussion
5- Conclusion
References
Abstract
In the current context of strong urban sprawl, it becomes urgent to find urban approaches that simultaneously promote ecological functions and relationships between people and nature in cities. Streets are omnipresent urban elements that can deliver ecosystem services and facilitate people daily interactions with nature. Promoting vegetation in streets can take different forms which have to be combined with people's preferences. Based on photomontages, we assessed people's perceptions and valuations for herbaceous vegetation types associated to various managements and designs of pavements. Using a combination of a local field survey and a French national online survey, we collected a total of 3609 responses representing a large diversity of socio-demographic characteristics. The results of the field survey confirmed those of the online survey. Although there was variability among people valuations, we found that lowly managed pavements with spontaneous vegetation were in average higher valued than highly managed pavements without vegetation. Pavements with spontaneous vegetation were perceived as less kept than pavements without vegetation, but more beautiful and less boring. We found a consensus of high valuations towards pavements containing vegetation integrated in small design interventions (flowers seeded in foot of wall, design of a meadow strip along the pavement), suggesting that people generally accept vegetation with visible signs of human actions or managements. Socio-demographic characteristics partly explained variabilities in photo valuations. As expected, people frequently connected with nature had the highest preferences for vegetated pavements, spontaneous or integrated in designs. These results show that vegetated streets can become daily biodiversity-friendly urban greenspaces appreciated by urban dwellers. We provide recommendations for promoting vegetation in streets that will be useful for politics, urban designers and managers.
Introduction
The current strong urban sprawl causes profound changes in ecological habitats and associated biodiversity (Grimm et al., 2008). However, it is now recognized that nature experience is required for improving urban dweller health and well-being (Botzat et al., 2016; Cox et al., 2017b) and that it can change people attitudes towards pro-environmental behaviors (Soga and Gaston, 2016). In this context, it is necessary that researchers, designers and managers propose urban approaches that simultaneously promote ecological functions and relationships between people and nature (Aronson et al., 2017; Gaston et al., 2013; Soga and Gaston, 2016). Nature in cities can be promoted at various scales in multiple public or private spaces (Aronson et al., 2017; Beninde et al., 2015). Land sparing and land sharing have been proposed as two spatial approaches located at both opposite ends of a continuum of nature conservation strategies (Lin and Fuller, 2013). Land sparing which consists in introducing large green spaces (e.g. parks) within a compact urban matrix has been shown an adapted strategy for hosting some large animals and uncommon plant species (Caryl et al., 2016; Kendal et al., 2017; Villaseñor et al., 2017) and to develop various people uses including walking, resting or jogging (Palliwoda et al., 2017). However, this approach induces a travel distance between housing and parks which can be a barrier to frequent people use (Soga et al., 2015).