A Methodological Approach for Estimating Urban Green Space: The Case of Thessaloniki, Greece

Sustainable Urban Mobility Plans (SUMPs) are considered as one of the most valuable policy tools for adapting the Sustainable Development Goals to the urban level and alter the way people move and live towards more sustainable patterns. SUMPs are strategic plans that focus on the performance of the transport system, but contrarily to traditional transport studies, they also thoroughly examine the interactions between transport and its interdependent systems, such as land-uses. However, the transition from theory to practice points out that a considerable number of SUMPs give little attention to significant land-use related issues, such as the available green space, mainly due to the lack of available data and/or easy-to-use calculation tools. In this context, the current paper presents a methodological approach for estimating Urban Green Space (UGS). As the proposed approach aims at illustrating in an actual manner how “green” a city is, it moves beyond the areas that are characterised in urban development plans as green. Thus, it takes into consideration many different types of green spaces, e.g. public and private, street, institutional, residential, parks. The developed methodological approach is a semi-automated GIS-based process that utilises the robust method of the Normalised Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) and uses remote sensing imagery as well as cadastral data. The proposed methodological approach was implemented in the seven Municipalities of the urban agglomeration of Thessaloniki, and the results highlight significant differences in the available green space per capita between the examined areas.