Maintenance planning for urban green spaces: standard, inventory, and record-keeping

Article 11 of the Spatial Plans Preparation Regulation, published in the Official Gazette dated 14 June 2014 and numbered 29030, requires that the preparation and amendment of zoning plans comply with the minimum standards and area sizes for urban, social, and technical infrastructure areas specified in the Regulation's ANNEX-2 table. The ANNEX-2 table took its current form through the amendment dated 17 May 2017.

According to the explanatory notes to the table, within district boundaries the open and green space standard is applied as 10 m²/person for children's gardens, playgrounds, parks, squares, neighbourhood sports areas, botanical parks, recreation sites, and recreational areas. Within this standard, the combined share of publicly owned children's gardens, playgrounds, parks, squares, and neighbourhood sports areas subject to the development partnership share may not be reduced below 75 percent. Across the province, 5 m²/person is added for zoos, urban forests, areas to be afforested, exhibition grounds, fairs and festival areas, and hippodromes, and the open and green space standard is calculated as a total of 15 m²/person.

The standard measures whether the area has been allocated in the plan. The actual condition of the area, how much of it has been developed and opened for service, and how often it receives maintenance are not recorded in the plan document. As the area per person increases, so does the maintenance workload; the grass area to be mown, the number of trees to be pruned, and the play equipment to be inspected all grow.

For this reason, the planning of park and garden units should begin with the area calculation in the zoning plan and continue with a count of the assets on the ground. Two parks of the same size can give rise to very different crew and material requirements, because one contains dense trees and an irrigation line while the other contains hard paving and a square.

The basis of the maintenance programme is a georeferenced list of the elements each green space contains. Keeping at least the following headings separately in the inventory makes it possible to determine the quantity and frequency of the work.

Information on the irrigation source is also important. Circular No. 2024/7 on Savings Measures also covers municipalities and stipulates that mains water will not be used for watering green spaces wherever possible. Without knowing which area is watered from which source, the extent to which this provision is applied cannot be demonstrated. For play equipment, the European standard EN 1176-7:2020 provides guidance on the installation, inspection, maintenance, and operation of playground equipment and surfacing; recording inspections with a date for each piece of play equipment is a precondition for applying this framework.

Most green space work depends on the season. The need for irrigation increases in the hot and dry months; work such as mowing, pruning, planting, spraying, and leaf collection is spread across different periods of the year. The annual calendar is created by defining these tasks with separate periods for each area, and shows the crews' workload month by month.

For the calendar to be useful, what is planned and what is done must be tracked in the same record. Areas where the mowing period has been exceeded, pruning that has been postponed, or plants that have dried out due to an irrigation fault only become visible through this comparison. Because weather conditions, citizen requests, and unexpected damage constantly change the calendar, it must also be possible to update it during the year.

One output of maintenance work is waste. The Zero Waste Regulation explicitly includes park and garden waste within the definition of biodegradable waste. Recording the quantity produced by pruning and mowing makes it easier to plan for this waste to be processed through recovery options such as composting.

According to Article 41 of Law No. 5393, the strategic plan and performance programme form the basis for preparing the budget. Under Article 56, the mayor prepares an activity report explaining activities according to performance criteria, together with targets, actual outcomes, and the reasons for deviations; the report is submitted to the council and disclosed to the public.

Records kept at the work-order level show which area was maintained when, with which crew, and with which material. These records make it possible to calculate the maintenance cost per area, foresee in advance the effect of newly opened parks on the maintenance budget, and respond to citizen requests on a documented basis. Where hazardous trees or play equipment inspections are concerned, a dated record is also evidence that the administration has exercised the required diligence.

The 2017 publication titled Urban green spaces: a brief for action, prepared by the World Health Organization Regional Office for Europe for urban policy makers and practitioners, addresses monitoring and evaluation as a separate heading alongside the planning and design of urban green spaces.

Regulation (EU) 2024/1991 on Nature Restoration, which entered into force in the European Union on 18 August 2024, aims, according to the European Commission's statement, for no net loss of urban green space and tree cover in urban ecosystems by 2030, and for the total area to increase steadily from 2030 onwards. Monitoring these targets rests on the regular measurement of green spaces and tree stock. For municipalities in Turkey too, an up-to-date green space and tree inventory is the first step toward making both the plan standard and the service on the ground measurable.