‘This is my magical place here’. Linking cultural ecosystem services and landscape elements in urban green spaces

Abstract

This paper aims to understand how cultural ecosystem services (CES) are shaped in public urban green spaces. Landscape, understood as a hierarchical complex of abiotic, biotic, and human-made elements, is considered as the basis of CES supply. Since CES are intrinsically linked to the on-site experience, we invited 27 experts to ‘walk and talk’ about landscape in five distinctive Public Urban Green Spaces (PUGS) in Warsaw. This qualitative approach allowed us to observe the process of co-production of CES by addressing three specific research aims: (1) to identify the relationships between biotic, abiotic, and human-made elements in PUGS; (2) to establish links between different types of CES provided by PUGS; and (3) to explore the links between CES and specific landscape elements within PUGS.

The results indicate that CES are co-produced by all landscape elements. Interviewees most frequently mentioned trees, birds, mammals, and water. In terms of CES, experts most often referred to active recreation, aesthetic experience, and passive recreation as benefits provided by urban greenery. Other CES included opportunities for social interactions, education, a sense of place, and tranquillity. The analysis also revealed several notable co-occurrences between ecosystem services and landscape elements as discussed by the interviewees. Active recreation was particularly distinctive here – unlike other CES, it was primarily associated with abiotic elements of the landscape, with landform being the most frequently mentioned. For other CES biotic elements were more important than abiotic.

This study’s findings suggest that people perceive the landscape holistically, whether they engage in recreational activities, admire the beauty of nature, or seek tranquillity. It has an important implications for future research of CES, by indicating that CES should be studied comprehensively, incorporating different elements of landscape which co-create them.