GREENTRAVEL

From street trees and vertical gardens, to urban meadows and forests, greenery plays an important role in sustaining healthy and liveable cities. However, the availability of greenery in our cities is also a matter of justice and equality: we don’t all access and experience greenery – and enjoy the benefits it imparts – equally. This is already well understood in residential neighbourhoods. Yet, the effects and benefits of exposure to greenery during people’s everyday active travel as they move around their city, and how equitably these are distributed, are less well known.

The GREENTRAVEL Project aims to leverage recent developments in urban informatics to produce novel understandings on the importance, availability and wellbeing impacts of urban travel greenery experienced by people in their everyday active travel environments. Furthermore, it will produce new knowledge on how equitably green exposure during travel and related wellbeing impacts are available to urban populations. It shall leverage this knowledge to develop new analyses and approaches to add greenery in urban travel environments to advance equity in European cities.

The Project has four objectives:

  1. To understand people’s experiences of urban travel greenery and its wellbeing impacts by examining associations between travel related green exposure and health and wellbeing benefits, including seasonal variations in these, through participatory mapping, cutting edge immersive Virtual Reality control trials and in-situ experiments. 
  2. To map urban greenery from the human perspective by taking advantage of extensive street-view images and computer vision techniques to map and examine greenery features and environments from human perspectives and during different seasons.
  3. To model everyday mobility patterns and green exposure during travel by using Mobile Big Data and detailed traffic route and public transport data to model urban mobility flows across seasons at the individual street level to generate green exposure measures across cities and at high spatial resolution. 
  4. To reveal inequalities in travel greenery exposure and prioritising improvements by integrating detailed spatial data on socioeconomic variation, everyday mobility flows and human perceptions of greenery to examine the equity of green exposure during travel across urban populations.

The project will contribute to transformational knowledge on the importance, availability and equity of green urban travel environments. It will produce completely new open methods and transferable procedures for analysing green travel environments in Europe and beyond.

GREENTRAVEL is a European Research Council Consolidator Grant project of Tuuli Toivonen, and lasts for five years (2023 to 2027). 

Read our recent news and watch our short presentation below to learn more! The publications list documents our scientific advancements to date. 
Project in a nutshell
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News
Publications
  • Poom, A., Willberg, E., & Toivonen, T. (2021). Environmental exposure during travel: A research review and suggestions forward. Health & Place, 70, 102584. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.healthplace.2021.102584
  • Helle, J., Poom, A., Willberg, E., & Toivonen, T. (2023). The Green Paths Route Planning Software for Exposure-Optimised Active Travel. Journal of Open Research Software, 11(1). https://doi.org/10.5334/jors.400
  • Willberg, E., Poom, A., Helle, J., Toivonen, T., (2023). Cyclists’ exposure to air pollution, noise, and greenery: a population-level spatial analysis approach. International Journal of Health Geographics, 22(5). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12942-023-00326-7
  • Torkko, J., Poom, A., Willberg, E., & Toivonen, T. (2023). How to best map greenery from a human perspective? Comparing computational measurements with human perception. Frontiers in Sustainable Cities, 5, 1160995. https://doi.org/10.3389/frsc.2023.1160995
  • Willberg, E., Fink, C., Klein, R., Heinonen, R., & Toivonen, T. (2024). ‘Green or short: Choose one’ – A comparison of walking accessibility and greenery in 43 European cities. Computers, Environment and Urban Systems, 113, 102168. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compenvurbsys.2024.102168
  • Klein, R., Willberg, E., Korpilo, S. & Toivonen, T. (2024). Temporal variation in travel greenery across 86 cities in Europe. Urban Forestry & Urban Greening. 102. 128566. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ufug.2024.128566 
  • Malekzadeh, M., Willberg, E., Torkko, J., & Toivonen, T. (2025). Urban attractiveness according to ChatGPT: Contrasting AI and human insights. Computers, Environment and Urban Systems, 117, 102243 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compenvurbsys.2024.102243
Previous projects

GREENTRAVEL project builds on our previous and other projects on urban exposures:
Funding