Urban green infrastructure assessment: identification of public green spaces misuse

Assessment of urban green infrastructure is a task of strategic planning and tactical implementation of decisions taken in the context of sustainable development of urban territories. One of the directions of such an assessment is to identify instances of land misuse within cities’ public green areas. It reflects the legal fairness of the use of urban green spaces, but currently has a weak scientific justification. Therefore, it is pertinent to develop a methodology for evaluating urban green infrastructure in order to pinpoint areas with inappropriate usage Critical analysis and synthesis allowed us to justify the assessment of the misuse of land within urban green zones as an equal element of the urban green infrastructure assessment system. A geospatial database was created to assess public green spaces. Using the results of remote sensing of territories, as well as the «boxplot» method in combination with the Python programming, the NDVI was calculated, and a classification of vegetation elements and artificial objects located within public green spaces in cities was carried out. Based on the obtained classification categories, a mechanism for identifying «green» areas with misuse of land was proposed, and a list of public green areas with similar violations in St. Petersburg was determined. The practical results of the study include: technology for assessing urban green infrastructure to identify public green spaces with misuse; geospatial databases of public green spaces for St. Petersburg; identified public green spaces with obvious violations of their use, including unauthorized parking, littering, sand dumps, unauthorized placement of industrial, warehouse, retail, transport, or other non-recreational facilities within the boundaries of PGS, vehicle collisions with «green» areas; erroneous inclusion of residential buildings and adjacent courtyards, non-residential facilities, as well as organized parking spaces within PGS’s boundaries.