How do People Perceive the City´s Green Space? A View from Satellite Imagery (In Hanoi, Vietnam)

In urban design and management green space is one of the most important components concerning the satisfaction degree of the urban inhabitants. In such a circumstance, it is crucial for land managers and urbanites to know which type of green space the people living in cities prefer. However, this question has not been studied in developing countries in Asia. In this paper we verify the relation between the vegetation density of different green space types (extracted from a satellite image) and people´s satisfaction in Hanoi city, Viet Nam. We conducted Quickbird satellite image segmentations and classifications by using image color, geometric and contextual information in the software Definiens 5.0. We then calculated the vegetation density based on administrative units. To evaluate the correlation between the mapped vegetation densities with inhabitants´ satisfaction we carried out Spearman statistical tests. With a precision of 79% of image classification, we obtained four types of green space: agriculture, park trees, street-side trees and isolated trees. The results show that people are the mostly satisfied with the green space where street-side trees are the most popular green type.