Greenery in the 15-minute city: Children’s walking accessibility and visual exposure to greenery in urban zones

• Integrating visual exposure to greenery (VEG) along walking routes into the 15-minute city framework. • 15-minute walking routes show lower VEG than routes exceeding 15 min. • Four categories of children’s walking environment based on walking accessibility and VEG. • VEG-based maps identify priority areas for preserving and replenishing greenery. Contact with nature has been weakly integrated into the 15-minute city concept, and children have largely been overlooked as pedestrians. A primary pathway for strengthening daily contact with nature may be visual exposure to greenery (VEG) along walking routes. The study jointly analyses children’s pedestrian accessibility to urban amenities and the greenness of their walking routes, and examines spatial variations in these combined characteristics across urban zones within a 15-minute city framework. We applied network and viewshed analyses to spatially explicit data on the residential locations of the entire population of children aged 7–15 (N = 48,266) living in Lodz, Poland. This enabled us to assess potential walking accessibility, defined as the shortest walking routes from children’s homes to eight types of urban amenities, as well as VEG along these routes in both close-up and distant views. We found a common tension between urban density and greenery: the more densely built-up an area, the more convenient the access to urban amenities, but the lower the VEG. However, the trade-off between greenery and densification is more nuanced. Post-socialist multifamily housing estates offer a promising balance, providing both walkable access to amenities and VEG for children. An integrated planning approach should move beyond proximity alone and allow for a more nuanced understanding of contact with greenery, explicitly accounting for seeing greenery during everyday walking trips. Context-sensitive planning is therefore necessary to capture the relationships between walking accessibility and VEG, and to better integrate proximity-based planning with urban greening strategies.