Work

Not your mean green: beyond averages in mapping socio-spatial inequities in urban greenery for smart cities

Year: 2026

Type: article

Abstract: As data-driven "smart city" agendas expand across Latin America, most urban performance metrics remain focused on infrastructure, connectivity, and aggregate efficiency, often neglecting who truly benefits. Urban greenery, a vital determinant of health and climate resilience, is one such blind spot. While some frameworks now consider "green space," they do so at a coarse, citywide scale, overlooking how access is distributed across neighborhoods and social groups. This obscures critical equity gaps, particularly in cities marked by deep socio-spatial segregation. In this study, we develop a fully reproducible geospatial pipeline that integrates high-resolution canopy height models, public park data, gridded population estimates, and socioeconomic strata to assess how greenery is distributed, not just how much exists. Applied to Bogotá and Medellín, the method reveals stark disparities: population-weighted canopy coverage rises significantly between the lowest and highest strata, while access to public parks also shows measurable inequality, especially in high-density, underserved neighborhoods. These inequities persist despite progressive greening policies, revealing the limits of optimization when legacy segregation is ignored. Our open-source pipeline enables finer-grained, justice-oriented audits that go beyond averages to identify where greenery and its benefits are most lacking. By enabling fine-grained equity assessments, this approach underscores the importance of greenery distribution, not just quantity, as a critical indicator for inclusive and equitable smart cities.

Source: EPJ Data Science

DOI: 10.1140/epjds/s13688-026-00627-4

Authors: Jenny Martinez, Javier Argota Sánchez-Vaquerizo, Sachit Mahajan

Institutions: ZHAW Zurich University of Applied Sciences, ETH Zurich

Language: English

Topic: Urban Green Space and Health

Subfield: Health, Toxicology and Mutagenesis

Field: Environmental Science

Domain: Physical Sciences

SDGs: Reduced inequalities, Sustainable cities and communities, Life on land

Open Access status: gold

Estimated APC paid: $1,890