LB 14-134 - A scoping review of landscape performance evidence for ecological parks

Ecological parks are a type of urban park where landscape design incorporates scientific ecological knowledge to jointly pursue benefits for people and nature and advance sustainability goals. Despite their growing presence in cities around the world, the success of this type of park in delivering intended outcomes is unknown. Performance evaluations of sustainability-oriented landscape designs are accumulating under the concept landscape performance (i.e., the effectiveness of landscape architecture works in meeting their goals and contributing to sustainability) and promise a way to address the gap on the success of ecological parks. As a first step, this study uses a landscape performance evaluations database and applies a scoping review approach to determine the state of knowledge on the performance of ecological parks. The preliminary findings shared in this presentation specifically inform on a) the extent of the evidence available and b) the performance areas where evidence is missing. The scoping review is based on 67 performance evaluations of ecological parks in six countries, although the majority of cases (51) are in the USA. Evidence was quantified for 37 benefit categories across environmental, social, and economic performance dimensions. A total of 611 performance benefits were reported for these cases, representing all but one of the performance categories. The most commonly reported single benefit was recreational and social value, a social benefit present in 79% of evaluations. Nevertheless, environmental benefits as a group had the greatest number of benefits observations (262), followed by social (215) and economic (134) benefits. Stormwater management, and operations/maintenance savings were the most reported environmental and economic benefits, respectively. On the other hand, performance categories that received little attention (present in less than 6% of evaluations) include air quality, food production, and cultural preservation. While performance categories need not be equally relevant for ecological parks (e.g., food production may be a rare feature overall), air quality and cultural preservation arise as future research targets. Additionally, an expansion of the geographical range of performance evaluations is needed to understand the success of ecological parks as an urban sustainability strategy across contexts.