This study concentrates mostly on the evolution of a city with a shortage of green spaces to a city with green and sustainable planning (Weber, Boley, Palardy, &Johnson, 2017), supporting the association between urban greenery and physical activity during the lockdowns by the Covid-19 pandemic in an urban context (Megahed &Ghoneim, 2020). Figure 1 organizes the strategies according to the construction of urban green corridors in the city of Riobamba, as a non-densified city.
- A focus is given to the importance between green areas, health, wellbeing, and multifunctional spaces in the territory during a pandemic, to avoid agglomeration spaces or saturated nodes. (Bibliographic analysis)
- A green diagnosis of the city of Riobamba is carried out and surveys are applied to the city’s inhabitants in order to understand their behavior during the lockdown and isolation caused by the pandemic. (City analysis)
- The construction of the urban green corridor is directed towards the planning and multifunctional role in the city, in order to create a resilient and future-proof city.
- The aim of this concept - that of multifunctionality - is the possibility to choose the best combination of green space components in order to provide the maximum number of urban services foreseen.
4.1 Study site
Riobamba is the largest and most populated city in the Chimborazo Ecuador province, located at the center of the Inter-Andean region (INEC, 2010). In Riobamba, lockdown and isolation became compulsory in March 2020 and lasted two months, boring the people in the city with 225,741 population, including 124.807 and 100,934 inhabitants in urban and rural areas, respectively. As of 7th December 2020, urban and rural areas reported a total of 197,998 confirmed cases and 13,778 deaths (Riobamba, 2020, Zabala Machado, 2019). The quantification of green areas and even taking into account areas that are not related to urban greenery. Riobamba has an index of Urban Green of 2.07 m2/inhabitant, showing 6.93 m2/inhabitant deficit in quantity (Arroba et al., 2020, INEC, 2010). According to the Directorate of Territorial Planning of the Municipality, Riobamba has 222 properties registered with 55% corresponding to vacant lots, these were reclassified from the list because some of them are currently with buildings, properties that correspond to communal houses, private parks, or areas outside the perimeter of the urban area or simply could not be considered for the construction of green areas and recreation, removing 47 of them, to obtain more updated information on the green line of the city.
The city has two water resources, including the Chibunga River and the water channel, a great potential for developing the urban green areas. The Chibunga river in the western part of the city has an average flow, and its servitude area is completely green, but its vegetation cover is mostly inadequate for absorbing CO2 emissions, the topography is irregular, and the valley borders vary from 20 to 30 m on both sides of its channel. The irrigation channel is on vertical concrete walls and has an easement area of 3 to 6 m on each side of the canal. The satellite images show a complete deterioration in these sections. Currently, this area is approximately 3 km in length, and its recovery could provide 30000 m2 of green areas for the city.
(1) Survey design
Many surveys (in Spanish) analyzed social aspects among 150 citizens in Riobamba using the Microsoft surveys platform (see: https://forms.office.com/Pages/ResponsePage.aspx?id=DQSIkWdsW0yxEjajBLZtrQAAAAAAAAAAAANAARYS45VUOUVSUkUySE1GNjJXMkhPT05IQUs1MkcyTi4u) during March and May 2021. These surveys obtain the citizens’ feelings about the lockdown and isolation experience during the Covid-19 pandemic in Ecuador since its beginning in the country, on the 9th March 2020 (ElComercio, 2021). Due to the impossibility of travelling to the Chengdu city in China and carrying out an "in situ" survey, the estimated measures have some errors like the erroneous answers that invalidate the survey, the percentage of confidence at 95%, and the margin of error at ±10 level. To decrease these errors, the research dropped 23 participants from the dataset due to failing in the attention-checks, leaving a total sample of 127 people within a statistical population of 124,807.
(2) Behavior of the population vs. usage of green spaces.
Surveys gathered and analyzed the citizens’ feelings in Ecuador between March and May 2021 to compare them with the experience in the pandemic period since the beginning of the pandemic in the country, the 9th March 2020. The Institute of Microbiology of the San Francisco de Quito University represents the results (ElComercio, 2021). This has turned the lockdowns into a routine that is a little annoying for the citizens.
Researchers should combine all these aspects of configuration, distribution, and design with urban landscape ecology to address factors such as structure, processes, and their interactions at a multifunctional level in relation to local and urban people. Each green space should improve the urban environment. These suggestions have two effects: direct and indirect (Azevedo, Luque, Dobbs, Sanesi, &Sunderland, 2020). The direct effect is in relation to human well-being, health, and social factors, and the indirect effects deal with the urban environment. Ignoring each effect causes imbalances such as the various effects of the spread of diseases and crowding-focused places that became evident during and after the encirclement by Covid-19 in 2020 (Belmeziti et al., 2018).
The results show that the people aged 15-25 and 26-35 years show the greatest tendency to leave their homes, equal to 76%, preferring destinations with recreation and relaxation activities. However, adults aged 46-65 years show the lowest percentage with 18% of those who delayed leaving, taking more than 7 days, unrespecting the mandatory lockdown. Those who went to green or urban recreational areas predominated with 70%, while 23% left the city in search of other types of entertainment, and only 7% stayed at home for fear of contagion, respecting the lockdown.
Regarding the distance of the green or recreational areas from their homes, 28% and 24% of the people prefer to move more than 500 m to neighborhood parks and urban parks, respectively. After more than one month, people were more confident to go out. In less than a week, only 10% left their homes more than 500 m away, while after more than one month, 29% left their homes and put their health at risk without completing the two months of lockdown. In other words, of the 30% of people who visited urban parks, from that percentage 6% of them had accessibility to the urban parks, and of the 40% of people who went to neighborhood parks, only 12% had accessibility to them or the park near of them had a good design and equipment.
The surveyed citizens consider the potential spaces for the green expansion in Riobamba even if they are far from their homes. For example, 21% recognized the Chibunga linear park, and 28% acknowledged certain neighborhood parks as a great ecological potential, whereas 27% admitted no projects with ecological characteristics in the city due to the lack of urban fauna.
The users’ preferences highlight the value of urban green spaces when moving outside the city because they mostly (equal to 58%) chose national parks or natural reserves with a greater extension of nature near or far from the urban area, and only 42% chose other urban areas or shopping centers inside or outside the city.
The last variable is public supply area and their congestion level, where respondents showed discomfort. 45% of people said that the downtown area, places like markets or supermarkets, were full of people, and 29% experienced the same in the southern area, within the main market of the city, where the inhabitants disrespected the sanitary norms imposed by Covid-19. 45% of the people attached great importance to the central and southern areas of the city, and went to markets at the center of the city. 29% said that they were not respected.
Figure 4 displays the main activities carried out by residents within the city, and how, when, and where they moved. This map illustrates the main agglomerations in parks, green places, recreational areas, and main supply areas, where we can see how the central and southern areas are mostly affected by these activities and by the unbalanced distribution of services and parks in Riobamba. Since less than a week after lockdown, 4% and 7% of the people left their homes in search of urban and neighborhood parks in the city, respectively, and 26% and 14% use these spaces a month after lockdown due to the importance of these places.
4.1.3 Construction of green corridors in Riobamba
This research covers 28,13 km2 of the urban area, including residual or active agricultural zones and existing open public spaces, to study how people interact with them before and after the pandemic. Preserving these areas from urban development improves the urban green index and imposes a new order for the territory as a safe or buffer zone and food distribution zone, which avoids agglomerations in the markets or city center.
According to Figure 8, this evaluation improves the connections needed to build a corridor for the city's benefits. This connection involves two valuable factors: the urban residents’ opinions based on their experience and the technological tools. The former expresses the needs of people, and the latter describes the needs of the urban environment. In this way, the urban green corridor connects with the highest gravity values and essential routes that connect with the city and allow different types of flows within them, in order to serve society.
This evaluation achieves one of the most important objectives of the research, which is to create a system of connections in multifunctional green areas that have the capacity to become health, dispersion, and food distribution points. Achieving this objective helps people in each of the five sectors to overcome future lockdowns, and to distribute the green areas in an equitable manner. This study analyzes the urban green corridor and its construction from the following two perspectives.
- The first perspective investigates the urban green places and their effects during the Covid-19 pandemic.
- The urban green areas had some effects on people who spent a long time indoors, serving a two-month lockdown.
- The first places where the urban residents firstly seek after the lockdown and with even mobility restrictions.
- The urban residents seek urban spaces with sufficient and necessary equipment.
- The second perspective explores the urban areas which have no intervention, active, and abandoned cultivation zones. The scarcity of services made such areas which have a high possibility for planning, connection, and densification of green areas to improve the sustainable development of the city. For this reason, the selected study areas are as follows:
- Building private residential areas during a sub-urbanization process fragments the land to provide the upper-class economic sectors with certain services.
- The vacant lands can be developed and distributed equally to benefit all the people irrespective of their socioeconomic levels.
(1) Node selection
The gravity model applied for the construction of green corridors within the city points out that the growing and rapid urban development has fragmented certain habitats in the city. Selected nodes use peripheral areas (partially or never urbanized) and vacant lands for renaturation, the extensive street system, and the existing public green spaces, represented by the dark green color. However, the city also has places where land exploitation has worn out the land by intensive use for agriculture, livestock, and mining. The intervention in these areas would be a problem both for the re-naturalization of the land and the economy. The light green color shows the same. Also, the blue color represents the urban settlement areas with low value. In these urban areas, intervention and connecting certain nodes are complex and have more weight in empirical judgment than the technological one.
The location and identification of the ecological nodes arise from the need for spaces expressed by the inhabitants of the city in the surveys, which coincided with the development of this research. The proposed ecological nodes will serve as source or destination points. Figure 10 selects 27 nodes both inside and outside the urban zone based on the following parameters. The patch area varies according to its location. For example, the nodes within the city were selected for their functionality and proximity to other green spaces such as parks or squares. The areas outside the city were selected for their ability to extend since they have the potential for a large and persistent population and wildlife. Another parameter is their location, allowing connectivity among all of them inside and outside the city and balancing the green areas for the consumption of all residents (Kong et al., 2010).
Table 1: Area of the nodes selected for the study
N°
|
Node
|
Area (m2)
|
1
|
“Sesquicentenario” urban park
|
24.421,53
|
2
|
“Guayaquil” urban park
|
30.078,06
|
3
|
“La Panadería” neighborhood park
|
27.656,08
|
4
|
Green Area
|
6.833,88
|
5
|
“Loma de Quito” park
|
12.552,31
|
6
|
“Maldonado” square
|
5.802,55
|
7
|
“La Libertad” square
|
7.514,05
|
8
|
“Politecnica” neighborhood park
|
23.145,55
|
9
|
“Las acacias” neighborhood park
|
27906,82
|
10
|
Urban expansion zone
|
180.283,39
|
11
|
Urban expansion zone
|
395.454,54
|
12
|
Green Area
|
4.906.47
|
13
|
“Yaruquies” square
|
2.605,7
|
14
|
“Sesquicentenario” urban park
|
18.661,32
|
15
|
Neighborhood park
|
4.179,06
|
16
|
Abandoned area
|
43.978,53
|
17
|
Train workshops
|
86.434,74
|
18
|
Abandoned area
|
97.584,10
|
19
|
“Sucre” square
|
5.375,93
|
20
|
Ecological park
|
303.651,01
|
21
|
“Los Shyris” neighborhood park
|
32.343,08
|
22
|
Natural Area
|
126.105,15
|
23
|
Urban expansion zone
|
26.006,20
|
24
|
Green Area
|
152.318,4
|
25
|
Urban expansion zone
|
3.196.331,57
|
26
|
Urban expansion zone
|
137.739,8
|
27
|
Urban expansion zone
|
1.871.315,50
|
(2) Construction of urban green corridors
According to Table 1, this step calculates the least cost path and identifies 27 nodes. In theory, the dispersion efficiency of the corridors depends on the source habitats and the impedance created by the mosaic of land use between sources and destinations. The gravity analysis provides 10 potential corridors that run largely through the main tree-lined streets of the city, the "Chibunga" river, and unused railroad workshops to promote connections for the different sectors in the research. This model selects, simplifies, and synthesizes the corridors based on two aspects. The first aspect is the gravity value (G). The higher the G value, the higher the corridor hierarchy. The second aspect of selection is those corridors whose link is redundant due to the convergence on another similar node located on the same route. This aspect prioritizes the natural and urban-natural landscape for the benefit of its ecosystemic and socio-cultural services. In addition, this aspect introduces a new order for the urban development of the city through the inclusion of isolated or developing areas that lack green spaces.
Figure 11 represents 7 corridors with the highest severity index. The corridor with the highest score is the one that connects:
The tool in turn provides the prioritization of the most potent green spaces based on the gravity model. In this way, this tool identifies corridors and patches with the best opportunities to create a network that conserves biodiversity in the long term, allows a more sustainable urban development, and with-it green spaces that allow the recreation of its residents. Figure 10 illustrates the corresponding G-index interactions of the nodes in the selection of scenarios.
The corridors identified through the model should provide important social benefits when prioritizing vacant parcels, urban voids, and some streets or alleys. As stronger community connections can be fostered, linking together with the corridor residential neighborhoods can increase access to green spaces and recreational facilities in underserved areas and thus influence people's perceptions of the new landscape. The design of these corridors balances the needs of urban residents who were present in the lockdown period without any opportunity for safe and healthy recreation. These corridors reinforce the concept of “social confidence” through a green network that allows such activities in daily life and even more in times of emergency - the activities and services that should be provided by the nodes that structure the corridors - as well as the existence of urban gardens that prevent the city center from collapsing.