Green Smart Spaces and Urban Ecosystem Services 2026

Green spaces promote environmental sustainability and quality of life for urban residents by providing a variety of benefits. They reduce air pollution, provide water filtration and cooling, and support biodiversity.

Smart technologies can enable green space inclusion and a nature-based approach to management and maintenance. Further “systems mapping” would help to link devices that share similar criteria and subcategories, supporting integrated, rather than ad-hoc, applications.

Diversity

Green spaces are important in urban areas, delivering benefits for people and wildlife through conservation, biodiversity, carbon sequestration, and human health. To maintain and enhance urban green spaces, city planners must develop innovative approaches to management and technology. These include integrating technology with nature and engaging the community to make sustainable decisions about the future of urban green spaces.

Using smart technologies to promote sustainability in urban green space management is an emerging field of study, but it can also be difficult for cities to implement these systems due to limited resources and lack of technical expertise. To improve the effectiveness of these systems, city planners must ensure that they integrate a range of factors, including biodiversity, landscape function, social impacts, and economic impacts.

The Sustainable Smart Parks (SSP) project in Gothenburg, Sweden, aims to create an open innovation arena for testing smart technologies in real-life environments. The project is a partnership between city departments, private companies, and manufacturers. The project has several objectives, including enhancing the quality of urban green space, increasing recreational value, and fostering community engagement.

To achieve these objectives, the SSP project uses different sensors to monitor and analyze environmental conditions in urban green spaces. These sensors provide information on energy consumption, water usage, and plant health, and can help identify opportunities for efficiency improvements. They can also be used to detect environmental hazards, such as flooding and storm damage.

To encourage diversity, SSP uses a set of 5 criteria to assess the effects of different smart technologies on urban green space management: diversity, connectivity, adaptation, inclusion, and perception. These criteria are based on the principles of green urbanism and nature-based thinking.

Inclusion

The integration of green spaces with digital technologies promotes inclusion in urban life, connecting people with nature. However, it is also necessary to include ecological processes and their interactions with humans. This can be achieved by building connectivity between cyclical and long-term processes and embracing a nature-based approach in cross-sectoral management and maintenance of urban green spaces (Randrup et al. 2020). This involves fostering new perceptions of (urban) nature from different esthetic, temporal and organizational perspectives, including a broader understanding of the complexity of landscapes and ecosystem services.

Smart green spaces can support the implementation of urban environmental sustainability goals by promoting community engagement and empowering citizens to make informed decisions about green space planning, monitoring and maintenance. Additionally, they can help to reduce energy consumption and water waste by using sensors to monitor soil moisture and vegetation health and to enable better irrigation scheduling. They can also help to improve air quality by reducing pollution and providing natural habitats for wildlife.

In addition, green smart spaces can improve water cycle stability by absorbing excess rainfall and improving water quality. They can also contribute to social life by providing recreational activities and places for public gatherings. Finally, they can also improve the city’s water supply by helping to drain excess stormwater and protect groundwater resources.

Despite the benefits of smart green spaces, their implementation can be challenging. Many cities may struggle to secure funding for the technology and infrastructure required to implement these systems. Moreover, smart green spaces require technical expertise to use and manage the data generated by sensors and other monitoring systems. This can be a challenge for cities with limited resources and a lack of skilled employees.

Perception

User perceptions of green spaces have a significant impact on the use and enjoyment of urban ecosystem services. The study reveals that users prioritize cleanliness, maintenance, quietness and safety in green space characteristics. The survey responses also revealed that perceived qualities like naturalness and historical value have a lower importance, possibly due to cultural differences. The survey data was combined with crowd-sourced geo-tagged green space visitation and an analysis of the underlying metrics using GIS. The resulting model accurately correlates spatial metrics and user perceptions, allowing for planning that aligns with users’ preferences in order to enhance urban well-being through the provision of regulating ecosystem services.