Optimizing ecosystem services of urban green spaces based on integer programming approach

As most of people will live in the cities in the coming decades, the needs for a better living environment in the urban areas have become of concern. Initiatives and movements have been emerged to promote ecosystem services as part of public goods that should be provided by urban governance. This idea leads to the green infrastructure concept as a way to gain benefits from nature. Therefore, planning the urban green spaces as a key element of green infrastructures becomes crucial. However, unlike the other types of infrastructures (i.e. roads, shops, hospitals, schools, bus station, etc.) that have obvious capacity and coverage area of services, urban green spaces relate to land use allocation where their size, shapes, compactness, contiguity, and distribution determine their capacity to deliver services. Therefore, there is a need to define spatial planning of urban green spaces which is able to maximize the provision of ecosystem services throughout the urban landscapes. This study aims to develop an optimization model that can be used to define the spatial shape of urban green spaces to maximize their potential of delivering different types of ecosystem services. The results show different optimization models that can be used to design urban green spaces which are capable of maximizing their coverage area of services.