Urban green space during COVID-19 outbreak: A comparison of city dwellers’ visitation

The global pandemic disease (COVID-19) has given temporary a positive effect to the environment condition and an extremely distressing impact to the social and economic sectors. Most countries-imposed lockdown and strict precautions to deal with this shock. These policy responses did decrease NO2 concentration and upgrade the air quality index in some countries. However, physical and mental health issues were reported to increase. Visiting urban green space could be one of the various solutions to address the problem even it may risk being exposed to the virus. This dilemma may affect the pattern of visitation urban green space in temperate and tropic countries. This study aims to understand how COVID-19 and government policy responses affect the visitation of a number of urban green spaces in temperate and tropic countries. The data were collected from Google Mobility Reports and John Hopkins University which had been retrieved by Our World in Data and SDG-Tracker of Oxford University. Six countries (Germany, Spain, Italy) representing temperate and Mediterranean and (Indonesia, Brazil, and Singapore) as tropic countries were chosen as study case from March to April 2020. The nation-wide lockdowns were implemented in Germany, Spain, Italy, and Singapore while Brazil and Indonesia decided to keep social distance and remotely working from home. These restrictions affected negatively to the visitation of urban green space in all countries except for Germany. Italy and Spain had the lowest percentage (up to -83.71%) of visitors during a high daily confirmed cases and strict measurements from the government at the end of March 2020 while Germany’s urban green visitors had increased up to 53.71%. Brazil had its lowest percentage number up to -61.57%, Indonesia declined up to - 43.29% and Singapore fell up to -68.14%. Keywords: urban green space visitation, policy responses, temperate, tropics ID: 3624053