Small Urban Parks: The Building Blocks of Low Carbon Cities

Abstract

The Low Carbon City (LCC) approach is a planning measure to help cities reduce carbon and strive for climate change mitigation. Small Urban Parks (SUP) had mushroomed in densifying cities where they can be close to people's homes and form a SUP network that connects to a larger central green space. This paper is a brief narrative literature review that reports on several studies in SUP to explore its role in LCC. SUP can play a role in LCC by reducing carbon sources, cutting down carbon emissions and strengthening carbon capture; a Strength, Weakness, Opportunity, and Threat (SWOT) analysis of SUP was devised to explore this notion. Based on the literature findings, the strength of SUP lies in its function as a network to strengthen its ecosystem services. The opportunities lie in considering the right vegetation characteristics and landscape design. Meanwhile, its weakness is the space limitation making it less effective than larger green spaces, and the potential threat is the release of carbon due to intensive use and, consequently, intensive management. The SWOT analysis concludes that proper landscape planning and design within SUP and green corridors connecting SUP can improve carbon capture efficiency, reduce fragmentation, and improve accessibility, ecosystem service, and microclimate at a local level.