In France's major urban centers, access to green spaces is very disparate

The most populated cities (200.000 inhabitants and more) generally offer the best proximity to squares, parks and gardens, according to this unprecedented work covering the 72 major urban centers of metropolitan France, i.e. 770 municipalities and 26 million inhabitants.

The proportion of residents living within 300 meters of a green space of at least 1.000 m2 is 60% in Paris, compared to 34% in large, less populated and less dense urban centers, INSEE explains.

It is in Dijon, Paris, Bordeaux or Le Havre that green spaces are most easily accessible, while Quimper, Nîmes or Aix-en-Provence are the least well-off, according to these criteria which do not take into account "blue spaces" such as the coastline, nor private green spaces.

In La Seyne-sur-Mer (Var), only 12% of the population lives near a green space, while in Creil, a commune in the Oise region surrounded by forests, this proportion rises to 75%.

These significant disparities can be partly explained by specific geographical features: the majority of large, sparsely populated urban centres are surrounded by vast public forests, and the others "compensate for their lack of surrounding vegetation by creating parks and gardens," explains the study, which is based on OpenStreetMap mapping and geographical data from the IGN.

The analysis "does not aim to award good and bad points, but to measure the ability of cities to provide immediate access to nature," which, according to the WHO, plays an essential role in public health and strengthening social ties, Martin Chevalier, head of the Statistics and Urban Analysis division at INSEE, explained to AFP.

"It is not the large peripheral forests that will help most to achieve this objective, but rather the small local parks," he stressed.

Bringing nature back into the city is a "major public policy issue" for local authorities, some of which, for example, are implementing the "3-30-300" rule, according to which every resident must see at least three trees from their window, in a neighborhood with 30% canopy cover and live less than 300 meters from a green space.