Column Actions

This indicator measures the amount of open public areas in cities; make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable.

This indicator aims to monitor successfully the amount of land that is dedicated by cities for public space (open spaces and streets). Cities vary considerably in size, history, development patterns, designs, shapes and citizen’s attitudes towards public spaces. Measuring how much public space a city has is only one part of measuring whether residents actually benefit from the space.

Ministry of Natural Resources (Physical Planning Unit)

Ministry of Natural Resources (Physical Planning Unit)

Annual

Km²

The value of public spaces is often overlooked or underestimated by policy makers, leaders, citizens and urban developers. There are several reasons for this, such as the lack of resources, or understanding or capacity to use public space as a complete, multi-functional urban system. Often the lack of appropriate enabling frameworks, weak political will and the absence of the means of public engagement compound the situation. Nevertheless, fundamentally, the lack of a global measurement indicator has hindered the local and global appreciation of the value of the public spaces.

​​​​​​Urban extent is defined as the total area occupied by the built-up area and the urbanized open space. The built-up area is defined as the contiguous area occupied by buildings and other impervious surfaces.

1. The fringe open space and captured open space together make up the urbanized open space in a given study area. In other words, the urban extent consists of all the buildings and the small open space areas (<200 ha) that are surrounded by buildings and the open space fringe that is within 100 meters of urban and suburban areas (i.e. where built up area is more than 25%).
2. Public space: The Global Public Space toolkit defines Public Space as all places that are publicly owned or of public use, accessible and enjoyable by all, free and without a profit motive, categorized into streets, open spaces and public facilities.
3. Parks: Open space inside an urban territory that provide free air recreation and contact with nature. Their principal characteristic is the significant proportion of green area.
4. Recreational areas: public areas that contribute to environmental preservation. Their main functions can be both ornamental and passive recreation.  These include areas such as playgrounds, riverfronts, waterfronts, public beaches, etc.
5. Civic parks: Open space created because of building agglomeration around an open area, which was later transformed into a representative civic area. They are characterized by considerable nature, specifically gardens and a good place for cultural events and passive recreation.
6. Squares and Plazas: Open spaces created because of building agglomeration around an open area. Its main characteristics are the significant architectonic elements and interaction between buildings and the open area. Squares are usually public spaces relevant to the city due to their location, territorial development, or cultural importance.
7. Streets are defined thoroughfares that are based inside towns, cities and neighbourhoods most commonly lined with houses or buildings used by pedestrians or vehicles in order to go from one place to another in the city, interact and to earn a livelihood. The main purpose of a street is facilitating movement and enabling public interaction. The following elements are considered as streets space: Streets, avenues and boulevards, pavements, passages and galleries, Bicycle paths, sidewalks, traffic island, tramways and roundabouts. Elements excluded from street space include plots (either built-up), open space blocks, railways, paved space within parking lots and airports and individual industries.
8. Land allocated to streets: refers to the total area of urban surface that is occupied by all forms of streets (as defined above). This indicator only includes streets available at the time of data collection and excludes proposed networks.

Data can be disaggregated by: Location (intra-urban), qualities of the open public space (safe, inclusive, accessible, green), the share of built-up area that is green open space in public use, the share of built-up area is universally accessible open space in public use, particularly for disable persons, type of human settlements and typology of public space.

The method to estimate the area of public space has been globally piloted in over 250 cities and this follows a series of methodological developments that go back to the last 7 years. The finalized methodology is a three-step process: a) Spatial analysis to delimit the built-up area of the city; b) Spatial analysis to identify potential open public spaces, field work to validate data and access the quality of spaces and calculation of the total area occupied by the verified open public spaces and c) Estimation of the total area allocated to streets.

The indicator is used to monitor successfully the amount of land that is dedicated by cities for public space; government of Belize to create more public spaces across the country.

A major challenge for local monitoring of this indicator is the maintenance and the application/consistency of use of universal definition, which broadly does not consider existing operational/functional administrative demarcations.

UN-Habitat has developed tools, programmes and guidelines to assist cities in measuring, and accounting for the available public space in cities. Some cities in the developing world lack formally recognized public spaces, that are publicly maintained. Understanding of the prevailing local contexts and primary data collection in collaboration with city authorities and local communities contribute significantly to collecting accurate and relevant data in these contexts.

All the metadata shown was gathered from United Nation Statistics Division. The metadata was extracted from https://unstats.un.org/sdgs/metadata/.