Recent health issues have raised awareness among the general public and stimulated debate over the future forms of urban living. Those factors which enhance healthier environments are receiving broader recognition in maintaining the health of citizens in a time of pandemic. The current article explores the framework of ecosystem services to examine the temporary interventions introduced in response to the current challenges. These short-term adjustments may indicate possible pathways for the future. Analyses of the impacts of forms of urban settings and particularly of green infrastructure as a primary element which improves citizens’ health are used to support the reflections.

The Role of Vegetation in Climate Adaptability: Case Studies of Lodz and Warsaw

The mapping of different aspects of urban phenomena and their relation to the physical cityscape has been greatly extended by the use of geomatics. The tradition to base reasoning on ‘understanding the world’ dates from the time of Aristotle. The extension plan for Barcelona (Eixample), developed by Cerdà, which opened the era of modern urban planning, was preceded by analyses of rich data, describing both detailed demographic issues and physical structures. The contemporary, postmodernist city planning continues this tradition, although a shift towards analyses of more human-related issues can be observed, covering, inter alia, citizens’ perception, cultural differences and patterns of human activities with regard to distinct social groups. The change towards a more human-related perspective and the inclusion of urban morphology analyses are direct consequences of this trend. The required data may be gathered within a crowd-sourcing participation process. According to communicative planning theory, communication with the wider public is indispensable in order to achieve the best results, and can be realized with the use of sophisticated IT tools. Evidence-based reasoning may be supported by images of significant aesthetic values, which inspire immediate reactions.

A compact city is one of the leading solutions to counteract the negative impact of climate change. It is also considered a node in the Transit-Oriented Development network. However, while a higher urban density can, on the one hand, positively influence public infrastructure, transport and economics, on the other hand, as we learn from the analysis of Berghauser Pont et al., it can have negative environmental, social and health impacts. Therefore, the main objective of this research is to look for the trade-offs, including density and provision of open green areas that will serve climate change adaptation. While climate change adaptation has been explored through extensive literature, there is still much to research, especially when dealing with small towns as an element of the region. Therefore, this paper focuses on a small town—Zgierz (less than 60.000 inhabitants) post-industrial town in central Poland near Lodz. The study presents the quantitative analyses of the urban form of Zgierz town centre, prepared using GIS using open-source data. First, we estimated the current residential densities and calculated population densities by applying the morphological types’ framework. Then we examined the provision and the actual distances to green areas. Moreover, the results were compared with local urban development documents. In conclusion, this paper presents the recommendations for balancing the density and amount of open green areas for the town centre of Zgierz and the scenarios for densifying urban lots in the heritage part of the town.