The Global Cities With the Most — And the Least — Public Green Space

By

Updated July 23, 2019

Paris is home to a number of spectacular parks such as Parc des Buttes-Chaumont, pictured here. But compared to other European cities, Paris' overall percentage of public green space is markedly low. (Photo: Guilhem Vellut/Flickr)

The World Cities Culture Forum is shining a light on how much — or how little — public parkland is available to residents and visitors of 34 major cities.

With the forum's list ranking each individual city by percentage of total land dedicated to parks, gardens and other publicly accessible green spaces, it should be noted that the data used comes almost exclusively from participating member cities of the London-based organization. (Several member cities including Zurich, Lisbon, Oslo, Lagos and Dakar have been omitted while non-member cities like Dubai and Berlin are included.) The year that the data was pulled from also varies city by city.

Some cities boast a relatively small percentage of public green space — not a shocking revelation to many. Istanbul, for example, has long publicly struggled with shortcomings in the park department. Conversely, the green space-starved nature of certain other cities might be an eye-opener to those who assume the opposite.

Case in point is Paris, an outwardly jardin-stuffed city that, in reality, is comprised of only 9.5 percent parkland. The city’s relative dearth of pollutant-absorbing, temperature-cooling green space likely plays a role in the city's recent struggles with poor air quality, deadly heat waves and other climate change-related phenomena that Mayor Anne Hidalgo and her administration are actively countering.

Paris' 9.5 percent is notedly low for a European capital — far lower than other European capitals such as Warsaw (17 percent), London (33 percent), Rome (34.8 percent), Madrid (35 percent), Stockholm (40 percent) and Vienna, which comes out at the top of the tree-shaded heap with a staggering 45.5 percent. Only Amsterdam (another surprise) and Berlin come close to Paris' low with 13 percent and 14.4 percent green space, respectively.

Asian cities that are positively bursting out of their seams are also seriously lacking in the parkland department. But this isn’t necessarily true across the board. Thanks in part to smart planning, some space-strapped Asian mega-cities such as Hong Kong (40 percent), Shenzhen (45 percent) and Singapore (47 percent) have a whole lot of open green space to spare.

Only a small number of North American cities belong to the forum — and they mostly fall in the middle of the road. Home to a number of generously sized and oft-overlooked parks in its outer boroughs, New York City leads the pack with 27 percent public green space followed by Austin, Texas (15 percent), Montreal (14.8), San Francisco (13.7) and Toronto (12.7 percent).

In addition to having the smallest amount of public parkland of North American member cities, Los Angeles also ranks amongst the lowest of all cities, just narrowly missing the bottom five. With a paltry 6.7 percent green space, it falls between Bogotá (4.4 percent) and Tokyo (7.5 percent). Underserved neighborhoods in L.A. and throughout California, however, are due to benefit from Proposition 68, a $4 billion general obligation bond passed in June that, among other things, will help to improve and expand small parks in low-income urban communities as well as spiff up larger, more established green spaces throughout the state.

Another eye-opener: Far from the bleak, gray wasteland that many assume it to (still) be, Moscow has seriously upped its park game at the direction of authoritarian President Vladimir Putin, who uses ambitious beautification projects in and around the Russian capital as a means of placating and currying favor with voters. Today, more than half (54 percent) of its land is now dedicated to protected open green space, more than any other member city of the Forum.

In addition to percentage of public parkland, the forum has compiled data on a large number of other "cultural indicators" including but not limited to the number of bookstores (Shanghai handedly tops the list with an astonishing 3,800), the number of Michelin star restaurants (congrats, Tokyo), the number of annual film festivals (Seoul and Sydney beat out New York and L.A.) and number of UNESCO World Heritage Sites (Amsterdam, Paris, London and Rome can all claim four.)

Starting with Moscow, here's a look at the five cities with the highest percentage of public parkland followed by five cities that could do with a whole lot more of it.