Contents

Strategic Planning for Urban Green Space Under Sublinear Scaling: Evidence from Remote-Sensing Scalograms Across 150 Global Cities

Author(s): Yan Li1
1School of English Language and culture, Xi’an Fanyi University, Xi’an, Shaanxi, 710105, China
Yan Li
School of English Language and culture, Xi’an Fanyi University, Xi’an, Shaanxi, 710105, China

Abstract

Urban green space is increasingly treated as a core planning asset because it supports heat mitigation, stormwater regulation, biodiversity, and public health. Yet cities also face structural pressures that constrain land available for vegetation as populations and built footprints grow. This article provides a planning-oriented synthesis of evidence on how green space quantity and spatial structure change with city growth, drawing on a globally distributed sample of 150 cities and a published remote-sensing workflow that constructs concentric-circle scalograms around standardized city centers. Green space is derived from Landsat-based NDVI using a city-specific upper-quartile threshold and evaluated with three landscape metrics: green share, mean patch size, and green connectedness. Across cities, reported green share increases with population but follows sublinear scaling (exponent 0.26), indicating declining per-unit green availability as cities become larger. Mean patch size and connectedness also increase with growth, but with patterns that vary by income and climate groupings. At the within-city scale, most cities exhibit statistically significant power-law relationships between scalogram extent and green space metrics, providing cross-scale validation of recurring spatial growth patterns. The findings translate into planning-relevant benchmark targets: if green infrastructure is expected to scale as a universal urban service, strategies must counteract the baseline tendency for green space to grow more slowly than city size.

Copyright © 2025 Yan Li. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Cite this Article

APA
Li, Y. (2025). Strategic Planning for Urban Green Space Under Sublinear Scaling: Evidence from Remote-Sensing Scalograms Across 150 Global Cities. Journal of Management and Planning Research, 2(1), 146-154. https://doi.org/10.66033/jmpr2025-213
MLA
Li, Yan. "Strategic Planning for Urban Green Space Under Sublinear Scaling: Evidence from Remote-Sensing Scalograms Across 150 Global Cities." Journal of Management and Planning Research, vol. 2, no. 1, 2025, pp. 146-154.
Chicago
Li, Yan. "Strategic Planning for Urban Green Space Under Sublinear Scaling: Evidence from Remote-Sensing Scalograms Across 150 Global Cities." Journal of Management and Planning Research 2, no. 1 (2025): 146-154. https://doi.org/10.66033/jmpr2025-213
Harvard
Li, Y., 2025. Strategic Planning for Urban Green Space Under Sublinear Scaling: Evidence from Remote-Sensing Scalograms Across 150 Global Cities. Journal of Management and Planning Research, 2(1), pp.146-154.
Vancouver
Li Y. Strategic Planning for Urban Green Space Under Sublinear Scaling: Evidence from Remote-Sensing Scalograms Across 150 Global Cities. Journal of Management and Planning Research. 2025;2(1):146-154.