The environmental neighborhoods of cities and their spatial extent
(2019) American Geophysical Union — Location: San Francisco
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- Abstract
- We define the new concept of an environmental neighborhood as the surrounding area influencing the environmental quality at a given point in a city, and we develop a method to measure its extent. Our novel approach illustrates that selecting this optimal neighborhood scale is critical for finding robust relations between environmental quality and urban attributes. Smaller footprints do not contain all the pertinent urban surface information, while larger footprints contain irrelevant, potentially misleading information. Both might result in erroneous conclusions. Using high spatial resolution datasets for air quality and urban parameters for New York City, we show that its environmental neighborhoods range in scale from 200 to 1000 m, and we identify the urban fabric and activity attributes that have the largest influence on its air quality. While the spatial extent of the environmental neighborhoods might change for different cities, the concept and methodology are generalizable and the data we use are becoming increasingly available for many cities around the world to replicate our analyses. The broader implications of our results are that spatial regression or machine learning models of air quality need to select the right environmental neighborhood scale to maximize model skill, and account for the full range of urban fabric and activity parameters. More importantly, our finding that the optimal footprints tend to be ~ 200 - 1000m in scale implies that, like social neighborhoods, environmental neighborhoods in cities are quite limited and areas with adverse air quality can be improved with localized intervention measures to reduce environmental and health disparities
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Llaguno, M., & et al. (2019). The environmental neighborhoods of cities and their spatial extent. American Geophysical Union, San Francisco. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/219378