Urban greenspace for nature, society and as culture: Case studies across Eastern Europe

Source abstract

Urban greenspaces (UGS) are increasingly recognised as critical infrastructure for urban sustainability, yet their social meanings and values remain underexplored in Eastern European contexts. This study examines how residents in Yerevan, Tbilisi, Kyiv, and Lviv perceive and value UGS across diverse socio-ecological conditions, including Ukrainian cities where the data were collected before the full-scale invasion, offering a baseline against which future changes may be assessed. Drawing on 809 semi-structured interviews, the analysis integrates the Nature’s Contributions to People (NCP) framework with the Urban Nature Futures Framework (UNFF) to assess patterns of use, perceived contributions, and underlying value orientations. The results show strong convergence in everyday use across cities, characterised by frequent visitation, proximity-based access, and the dominance of walking, relaxation, and social interaction. Physical and psychological experiences represent the most prominent contributions, closely intertwined with relational values such as social connection, identity, and place attachment. In contrast, regulating and intrinsic ecological values are weakly articulated in residents’ narratives. This reveals a consistent asymmetry in the ways urban residents articulate values associated with nature, with lived and socially embedded experiences dominating over ecological considerations. The findings suggest that the effectiveness of UGS depends less on ecological optimisation alone and more on their integration into everyday life. For the Ukrainian cities, the findings establish a pre-war baseline showing the importance of UGS for relaxation, social interaction, and everyday life, against which future assessments of war-related changes can be compared. The study contributes comparative empirical evidence from an underrepresented region and advances value-based approaches to urban green infrastructure by demonstrating how sustainability outcomes emerge through the alignment of ecological functions with value structures.