*5.8. Definitions*

As noted in Table 5 and Figure 5, urban greenway definitions highlight certain recurring themes including "transportation," "natural," "public," people," and "places." If we aggregate terms such as "walking," "pedestrian," "bicycling," "skating," "pathways," "routes," "trails," "movement," "traffic-calmed," and "streetscape," it is clear that non-motorized transportation in the form of walking and biking is a dominant idea running across urban greenway definitions. Likewise, terms such as "landscaped," "vegetated," and "natural" connote flora and greenery. In sum, the definitions offered here are largely synonymous with one of four greenway definitions offered by Little [4], p. 1): "any natural or landscaped course for pedestrian or bicycle passage."

One aspect that is, however, missing from this definition is that urban greenways are also "public places," as noted in our review. The notion of "place" is an important, albeit nuanced, idea. The term is often conflated with "space." But space is an abstract term that has no correlation with human experience. In other words, space has no inherent meaning. A place, on the other hand, signifies a space that has social meaning, and this meaning is mediated by human experience [86]. Thus, urban greenways are not merely vegetated corridors for non-vehicular transportation, they are linear public parks that can provide amenities we normally associate with urban parks writ large: places for public gathering; places for nature contact and recreation; and places of civic pride. The Rose Kennedy Greenway, for example, has transformed downtown Boston. Running along the roof of a submerged highway, the greenway includes a series of contemporary parks designed by landscape architects that include public art, food trucks, farmers' markets, fountains, a carousel, and a visitor center for the Harbor Islands, all of which is bound together by vegetated areas. With this in mind, we offer the following definition: "Urban greenways are linear public parks and places that facilitate active travel and recreation in urban areas."

The anthropocentric focus of urban greenway definitions is noteworthy. Indeed, none of the seven definitions that emerged in this review explicitly references non-human environmental processes, organisms, or values. This is quite different from scholarly characterizations and definitions of greenways writ large, where wildlife and ecosystem processes and patterns rooted in landscape ecology figure prominently.
