Seminar: "Environmental injustices in the city of Rome", by Giulia Benati

Giulia Benati will be giving a seminar at ICTA-UAB. This seminar will be a hybrid event, with attendees having the option of attending via Zoom (emailed to you following sign up) or in person at ICTA-UAB.

 

Title: "Environmental injustices in the city of Rome. Assessing the accessibility to cultural ecosystem services based on geotagged social media data"

Speaker: Giulia Benati, researcher at BCNUEJ of ICTA-UAB
 

Date: Thursday, February 2nd, 2023
Time:11:00 AM – 12:30 PM CET
Location: Sala Antoni Rosell (Z/022 - Z/023) ICTA-UAB and online https://www.eventbrite.com/e/environmental-injustices-in-the-city-of-rome-tickets-488675189647

 

Urban green spaces (UGS) provide multiple benefits and enhance people’s mental and physical health through the delivery of cultural ecosystem services (CES). Yet, the benefitting from CES is determined by the accessibility to UGS, which is often reduced for the most fragile population groups, such as those with limited mobility or socio-economic disadvantages. While accessibility to UGS is fundamental, it is not a sufficient condition for access to benefits, as the quality of UGS, and consequently the CES they deliver can strongly differ.

However, as qualitative approaches to assess UGS quality are resource- and time-consuming, most research at municipal level has assessed distributional justice exclusively focusing on the accessibility to UGS. This study will expand on previous research by assessing distributional justice considering both the distribution of UGS and their quality in terms of CES, by examining georeferenced social media data. Using the city of Rome as a study area, we: (1) assess the population who has access to UGS at different walking distances through a geographic information system (GIS) network analysis; and (2) assess the CES flow of these UGS through a semantic analysis using geo-tagged social media data from Twitter. Our findings show that equal accessibility to UGS is a necessary factor for an environmental just city, but it is not sufficient: despite some inhabitants seem to have good accessibility levels, they dispose of a poor CES variety and therefore of a low UGS quality, especially in the most disadvantaged areas, not receiving the benefits that UGS deliver elsewhere. The thereby informs urban decision-makers on the one hand where the population needs higher access to UGS and on the other hand where it lacks access to specific CES.

Researcher description

Giulia holds a MSc in Environmental Engineering focused on Sustainable Urban Planning, and a BSc in Environmental Engineering, from La Sapienza University of Rome. She has been a guest researcher at the IRI-THESys research institute of Humboldt University of Berlin. She is interested in the human-nature interaction in cities, and in how decision makers can foster ecosystems protection while enabling access to urban nature for all. Her doctoral research focuses on the assessment of a holistic index of the quality of green urban spaces through an ecosystem services perspective. She is currently focusing on the assessment of cultural ecosystem services offered by green urban spaces through social media data and the implication of their distribution on environmental justice. Before starting her PhD, she worked in the private and public sector, and was an urban environmental planner for the City of Rome.