Reshaping Neighbourhood Parks for Biodiversity and People: a study on pocket green spaces in Bangalore, India

Abstract

Urbanization is a dominant geographic trend and that has affected cities especially those newlinethat have green spaces as part of their traditional culture. Our towns and cities are newlinegrowing at such an unprecedented rate that by 2050, 6 billion people are projected to be newlineliving within cities. This dramatic transformation over the recent years has strongly influenced the human social and cultural attributes. Development is fast changing the identities of cities, however our knowledge and understanding of their effects on urbanscapes and ecology, and its consequences on human wellbeing is far from complete. Green spaces are being lost to various developments, resulting in poor environmental conditions and a growing disconnect between humans and nature. Bangalore, which traditionally comprised of diverse green spaces such as large green newlinespaces, Heritage Parks (HPs) to small home gardens, are all decimated due to development. The transformation from Garden City to IT City has brought along newlinemixed cultures and changed lifestyles, which has affected the city s culture and practices newlineassociated with green spaces. The unprecedented growth within the city has allowed for the development of newer pocket green spaces, Neighbourhood Parks (NPs) which no longer resemble the traditional wooded green spaces but represent the modern trendy newlinegreen spaces with little or no woodiness in them. Although there is increasing dependence on NPs, they remain ignored, neglected and lack newlinestewardship. This study focuses on the reasons for such negligence towards NPs, in spite of these small green spaces providing various ecosystem services to the neighbourhood communities. Also, I emphasize on the importance of ordinary nature which may not provision ecosystem services at the magnitude of the large green spaces, but can still provision a certain level of services, which is essential and can improve human well newlinebeing.