Green spaces for recreation in densifying urban landscapes through the eyes of the residents – mental mapping in southern Stockholm, Sweden

The increasing densification in cities worldwide has led to various challenges, one of them being the loss of green spaces, which leads to increasing and diversifying pressure on the remaining green infrastructure. As city´s green infrastructure delivers important ecosystem services, crucial to its resident´s wellbeing, it is of uttermost importance to secure a resilient flow of benefits from the remaining green spaces. To find suitable ways to navigate the current challenges and create sustainable and resilient urban landscapes, urban land use planning, decision-making and practical management need to gain deeper insights to how residents perceive and interact with their surrounding landscapes, particularly the remaining green spaces. How people value green spaces and what perceived barriers to these are can highly influence if or to what extent people use green spaces and hence have access to their potential benefits.

Until now, methods such as on-site visitor studies, online surveys or public participation GIS have been applied to understand how people perceive and use green spaces. Nevertheless, complementary methods are needed that address what people perceive in a landscape based on their own presentation and associations. The mental mapping approach has the potential to add new layers of knowledge (e.g. local knowledge, tacit knowledge) about how residents perceive their surrounding city landscape and how different perceptions can evolve from a landscape. By applying this method as a participatory mapping tool and accessing additional sources of knowledge, decisions in urban planning and practical management can be improved and potential land use conflicts proactively detected and navigated.

The city of Stockholm, a rapidly densifying urban environment, was chosen as a case study area to analyze how the mental mapping method can contribute to understanding people's perceptions of their surrounding green spaces focusing on recreational purposes. In summer 2018, about 90 residents in two neighboring districts in Stockholm, were asked to draw a sketch map of outdoor, green places they go to for recreational purposes, afterwards answering a few interview questions regarding perceived benefits and barriers to green space and sense of place. The collected mental maps showed the resident´s spatial perceptions, orientations, preferences, and important landscape elements. Repeatedly drawn landscape elements provided information about a shared geographical imaginary and important hot-spots in the study areas. Ongoing transformation processes through densification were already impacting respondent´s perceptions and their sense of place. In conclusion, this study showcases in what ways mental mapping has a great potential to improve the understanding of people's perceptions of the landscape and its green spaces, which can in turn support a resilient and locally adjusted landscape planning process, design and practical management. 

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The study is part of the Enable research project: http://projectenable.eu/

This research was funded through the 2015–2016 BiodivERsA COFUND call for research proposals, with the national funders the Swedish Research Council for Environment, Agricultural Sciences, and Spatial Planning; the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency; the German Aerospace Center; the National Science Centre (Poland; grant no. 2016/22/Z/NZ8/00003); the Research Council of Norway; and the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness.