Role of green spaces developing social and ecological environment in historic urban centers

XX a. daugelis pasaulio miestų susidūrė su centrinių dalių modernizavimo būtinybe. Pokario metais pertvarkant miestų istorinius centrus nebuvo išvengta klaidų: žaliosios ir atviros erdvės buvo kuriamos griaunant istorinius pastatus ir ardant urbanistinę struktūrą. Pastaraisiais dešimtmečiais įsigali idėja, jog miestų ekologines, socialines, ekonomines ir kitas problemas reikia spręsti integraliai. Tai pagrindžia straipsnio tikslą – išanalizuoti želdynų ir kitų apželdinimo formų reikšmę vystant istorinių miestų centrų ekologinę ir socialinę aplinką.In the 20th century numerous historic cities around the world had encountered the problem of modernizing their historic centers. The firs modernization efforts ignored the mutual inks between the material, social environment and ecological situation and resulted in many irreversible mistakes: green open spaces in historic urban centers were created demolishing valuable historic buildings and altering historic urban structures. The increasingly popular ideas of sustainable development, the understanding of integral links between the material, social, economic, cultural, and ecological environment of cities has encouraged searching for the new integrated strategies for improvement of the physical environment and ecological situation in historic urban centers and maintaining their sociocultural and socioeconomic viability. Considering the experience of the foreign countries and the contemporary problems of Lithuanian cities concerning the development of social and ecological environment in historic urban centers, two main aspects determining the relevance of the research can be distinguished: the problems of functioning of public spaces and the lack of high quality green spaces in Lithuanian historic city centers; the principles of sustainable or ecological design are still not applied in the centers of Lithuanian cities despite the need to improve the ecological situation there and to solve the social problems. The main aim of the research was to analyze the premises for the development of social and ecological environment in historic urban centers using different green structures and open green areas based on the analysis of literature and Lithuanian and foreign examples. In order to reach this aim, the main ideas of development of ecological and social environment in cities were discussed with the emphasis on the role of green areas and structures in these processes, the peculiarities of development of green spaces and structures in historic built environment were analyzed based on the characteristic examples, the comparison of the most popular types of green spaces in historic urban structures was made using the space syntax method, and, based on the results of the analyses, the conclusions were formulated