In this work, Mary Killilea and Anne Rademacher work to document and understand New York’s mosaic of vegetated and built up spaces. Our work is based on the idea that in large, dynamic cities worldwide, planners and policymakers share a common assumption: green and open spaces, usually shorthanded simply as “urban parks,” serve as a general indicator of urban ecological vitality, livability, and, increasingly, urban resilience. As a result, organizations from the World Health Organization to individual municipalities like New York City have designated specific acceptable distances to, and distributions of, urban green spaces as an ideal for urban development.
Yet “parks” vary widely in their size, composition, and possible uses, and phrases like “green space” and “open space” signal categories that contain substantial variation in biophysical composition and social characteristics. The conflation of multiple different spatial forms is consequential: variation makes it difficult to empirically determine the ecological function and vitality of cities based solely on a total number of parks present in a given city, or based on whether citizens live a certain distance from them. Furthermore, the spaces that are formally designated as green, open, or park spaces often represent only a fraction of the actual spaces that make a significant contribution to a city’s biosocial function and vitality.
In this study, we distinguish between a city’s formally recognized map of official “parks” and the more extensive mosaic of ecologically important city spaces. We propose the concept of the “green urban fabric” as a way to capture both the formally designated green spaces in a given city and the wider, more informal network of ecologically important spaces of which that fabric is composed. The study will allow us to compare existing assessments of resilience that are based on present assessments of green/open/park spaces to those that are based on a fuller green urban fabric. The study will use neighborhoods in New York City as case studies.
Our agenda is twofold: first, by developing a foundational typology for disaggregating the formal meta-category of the city “park,” we will demonstrate that a given city’s formally designated network of “parks” is extremely diverse in size, composition, biophysical structure, social context, and biosocial function. Second, we will employ a multidisciplinary, iterative research protocol to identify and assess a given city’s landscape of green spaces that, although not formally designated as parks, may serve important biosocial functions that in turn contribute to overall resilience. In so doing, we will identify and assess that city’s green urban fabric — in this case, New York City’s urban green fabric.
By creating and operationalizing essential tools for capturing the comparative biosocial functionality of the formal map of parks, and by contrasting this to the green urban fabric, we will demonstrate a more robust and complete approach for determining relative resilience in New York.