Greenest cities in Europe, and where Hamburg stands

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If you have flown into Hamburg for the first time in summer, you were probably as surprised as I was when you looked out of the window and saw how green the city is. The more I explored the city, the more that surprised me. Whether you look down from the top of the Planetarium or from the bunker, you see a mass of trees packed between the buildings. They are like the dark matter of the city.<br>At the same time, every time I came across a news article about the greenest cities in Europe, I was disappointed not to find Hamburg on the list. I thought maybe Hamburg is green, just not as green as I imagined.<br>I lived with that for a while. Then I came across a newly published study, "Assessing European cities with the 3-30-300 rule underscores the need for enhanced urban greening efforts", and I realised I had never actually looked at the method behind those lists.<br>If you think about greenery, you think about parks, forests and trees. So you take the area of the city, divide the green area by it, and you have a score. In one way that makes sense. But you can also live in a city where there is almost nothing green around the places people actually live, while the city has huge forests on the outskirts. On that calculation, the city still ranks high.<br>What the 3-30-300 rule actually measures<br>The 3-30-300 rule does not measure how much green space fits inside the city borders. It measures how much green space people have close to their home, work or school. It has three parts:<br>3 trees must be visible from the place<br>30% canopy cover in the neighbourhood<br>300 meters to a high quality public green space<br>So if the place you live meets all three, you are living in a green area and you will run into greenery in your everyday life. It is not only about where the green areas are, it is about where the green areas are in relation to where people live.<br>I am not going into the details of the calculation, you can check the paper for that. But I can tell you which part is the bottleneck. Across Europe, 47% of people can see three trees and 57% live within 300 meters of a park, while only 28% live in a neighbourhood with 30% canopy cover. The canopy criterion is the one cities keep failing.<br>The 3-30-300 score of European cities<br>The study covers 862 cities. When I looked at the top 10, I realised that not one of them shows up in any of the greenest cities lists I had seen before:<br>Top 30 Greenest Cities in EuropeI have honestly never been to any of these cities. But compared to the lists I had seen until now, this one feels more realistic to me, especially when you look at where the usual names land.<br>In most greenest cities lists you get Oslo, Stockholm, Copenhagen, Vienna. Here, Stockholm is 14th, Oslo is 86th, Vienna is 282nd and Copenhagen is 498th.<br>This does not mean those cities are not green. It means that not everyone who lives in them has green space near their door.<br>The Europe-wide picture is worse than I expected. Only 13,5% of the people in these 862 cities live somewhere that meets all three criteria. Espoo and Varese are the only two cities in the whole study where more than half the population does. You can check the full list here.<br>So where does Hamburg stand?<br>Hamburg comes in at 28th. It does better than most cities in the study, but seeing it there still made me a bit sad. I expected the top 10.<br>Then I looked at the individual scores and got confused:<br>3 trees: 68,17%<br>30% canopy: 63,63%<br>300m from a park: 59,40%<br>Total score: 38,37%<br>I expected the total to be higher. When I looked closer I understood that the total is not the average of the three. It is the share of the population that meets all three at the same time.<br>So 68% of people can see three trees from where they live, work or study. 63% have 30% canopy cover in their neighbourhood. 59% have a park within 300 meters. But only 38% have all three at once.<br>That last number is easier to feel if you turn it around. Hamburg has about 2,07 million people. Around 1,3 million of them are missing at least one of the three where they live.<br>Hamburg is doing well on canopy by European standards, by the way. The 63,63% here is more than double the European average of 28% for that criterion.<br>Mapping it<br>I could not stop there. I wanted to know the score of my own neighbourhood and the places where I spend most of my time. Doing that helped me to understand why my expectations of Hamburg were so high in the first place.<br>The authors published the raw data for all of Europe, so I extracted the Hamburg part, projected it onto a map and added colour grading. This is the result:<br>The 3-30-300 Rule for Hamburg available on the Franzbrötchen app (soon on iPad as well)If you know Hamburg, this will not surprise you. The city centre, the industrial areas and the waterways are red, which means they meet none of the criteria. The wealthier districts around the Alster have a lot of cells meeting all three.<br>The southern...