Søren Præstholm

Recent empirical research has confirmed the importance of green infrastructure and outdoor recreation to urban people’s well-being during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, only a few studies provide cross-city analyses. We analyse outdoor recreation behaviour across four Nordic cities ranging from metropolitan areas to a middle-sized city. We collected map-based survey data from residents (n = 469–4992) in spring 2020 and spatially analyse green infrastructure near mapped outdoor recreation sites and respondents’ places of residence. Our statistical examination reveals how the interplay among access to green infrastructure across cities and at respondents’ residential location, together with respondents’ socio-demographic profiles and lockdown policies or pandemic restrictions, affects outdoor recreation behaviour. The results highlight that for pandemic resilience, the history of Nordic spatial planning is important. To support well-being in exceptional situations as well as in the long term, green infrastructure planning should prioritise nature wedges in and close to cities and support small-scale green infrastructure.

Profound digitalization of public administration is gaining momentum and spatial planning is no exception. To increase the transparency of planning and its usefulness for public and private actors, planning authorities have integrated production and online distribution of digital plan data within existing planning practices and workflows. Many European countries have established public spatial planning databases. Denmark is one of the forerunners in that digitalization. Since 2006, all legal plans are registered in an open geodatabase including over 34,000 currently effective local development plans. Despite the obvious potential of such data to inform about planning practice and associated outcomes, research using these new data is rare, mainly focusing on technical or judicial aspects. Questions related to planning practice, efficiency, evaluation and design have hardly been looked into. In this paper, we provide a short overview of digital plan data in the Danish database as well as similar data in Nordic countries. We then discuss research perspectives regarding plan evaluation and planning practice and we argue that digital plans represent a new transdisciplinary type of intentionally explicit data source for analysis of land change processes.