A New Algorithm Helped Find The Greenest City In The World

Estimating foliage percentage based on vegetation mapping on Google Maps yielded the top 10 greenest cities in the world

There are different methods for estimating how green a city is. We can count the parks, add up all green areas, quantify only the forested areas, specify the number of trees planted, and more recently, according to this new, we can now analyze the inhabitants' perspective.

A team of researchers led by Newsha Ghaeli, at MIT’s Senseable City Lab has developed a method to find out how green an urban space is from the perspective of pedestrians.

Images taken from Google Street View are processed by an algorithm that estimates the percentage of each image that corresponds to trees and other types of vegetation. “It is important to understand the number of trees and treetops that cover the streets, as this is what we perceive in cities,” Ghaeli said.

Check out the top 10 greenest cities according to the algorithm below.