Greenery in cities is not only a whim of aesthetes and ecologists
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Loading... - Georgina Kane
- 13 Jul 2022
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As indicated by the report of the Supreme Audit Office, the pandemic had a negative impact on the greenery available in cities, weakening the already ineffective protection of green areas in Poland. As we remember during the first wave of Covid-19 cases in spring 2020, authorities banned entry to parks and forests. In the act introduced on March 8, 2020, among the solutions to combat Covid-19, a provision appeared that allows the implementation of investments without local plans.
When they were missing, it was not even necessary to obtain a decision establishing the development conditions or a building permit.
Unexpected victims of Covid-19
According to the Supreme Audit Office, at the end of 2020, only 31 percent of local plans were covered. country area.
Local plans are a key instrument for municipalities to ensure the right amount and availability of green areas for residents. However, creating a plan is not obligatory, which is why Poland is very diverse in this respect. In the capital city, at the end of 2020, the area covered by local spatial development plans amounted to less than 40%, while in Kraków this area has increased to nearly 70% in recent years. And it was the largest increase - by approx. 19% in the period examined by the Supreme Audit Office, i.e. from January 1, 2015 to December 31, 2020.
The plans in Kraków also include protection against development of naturally valuable areas, which is not a common practice of local governments in cities.
Ranking of green districts
- Contact with nature allows us to better cope with stress, giving respite in difficult moments and positively influencing our mental health, therefore the presence of green and recreational areas nearby has become one of the most desirable parameters of a dream apartment. Since green is such an important aspect of our lives, we decided to investigate how access to it is shaped in Poland - says Marta Buzalska, an expert at Otodom, an information service from the real estate market.
Otodom, together with Heksagon, an organization providing services to local governments and other institutions that want to take into account the knowledge and opinions of residents in working on the development of the city, examined how residents assess the greening of Warsaw, Kraków and PoznaÅ„. This is how the "Ranking of green districts" was created. The criteria are: the presence of large trees, parks and even forests, the condition of vegetation and the availability of green areas for residents.
- It turned out that for the quality of life it is important not only how much green there is in the entire city, but also whether it is close or far away from where you live. We included in the ranking, among others access routes to green areas. A similar approach was found in the draft of the new act on spatial planning and development, which was recently consulted by the Ministry of Development and Technology. Standards for the accessibility of green areas are proposed there, saying, for example, that new buildings should be a maximum of 3 km from public greenery with an area of ​​not less than 20 ha - says MichaÅ‚ Czepkiewicz from Heksagon. Read More…
