Child-Centred Assessment of Accessibility to Public Green Spaces

Equitable accessibility to public green spaces is vital for supporting urban children’s health and wellbeing, requiring more nuanced assessment methods than traditional buffer or network analyses. This study applies the Gaussian Two-Step Floating Catchment Area (G2SFCA) model by integrating age-specific walking thresholds and context-specific parameters tailored to primary school children’s physical accessibility to nearby public green spaces. A 400-metre pedestrian network distance threshold is applied, reflecting empirical evidence on the independent mobility of children aged 6 to 12. The model designates primary schools as demand points and nearby public green spaces as supply points, weighting demand by student populations. It also incorporates a Gaussian distance decay function to capture the decreasing likelihood of green space use with increasing travel distance, thereby improving assessment realism. Applied to 107 Flemish-speaking primary schools in the Brussels-Capital Region, results reveal substantial spatial inequalities: over 75% of schools exhibit very low accessibility, and more than 71% face limited green space availability. Higher accessibility clusters near large green spaces on the urban periphery, while dense central neighbourhoods show persistent underprovision. Although the accessibility scores exhibited a strong correlation with the availability of green space (Pearson’s r ˜ 0.95), this relationship was not consistently observed across all cases, indicating that factors such as pedestrian network structure and competing demographic demand also influence accessibility patterns. This child-centred, context-aware model offers an improved framework for assessing spatial equity in urban green space accessibility, providing insights beyond simple availability metrics and supporting targeted planning interventions for underserved schools.