MacroSnaps8 November 2026
No. 120Of seven big cities, London has the most public parks and woods: 85 Central Parks' worth. Per person, Berlin has the most, 55 square metres each. That is five times as much as each Parisian gets.
Berlin
55 m² a person
21,155 ha, 62 Central Parks
Los Angeles
42 m² a person
16,149 ha, 47 Central Parks
Munich
34 m² a person
5,553 ha, 16 Central Parks
London
32 m² a person
28,920 ha, 85 Central Parks
Madrid
18 m² a person
6,245 ha, 18 Central Parks
New York
15 m² a person
13,071 ha, 38 Central Parks
Paris
11 m² a person
2,283 ha, 6.7 Central Parks
Paris, no woods
2 m² a person
448 ha, 1.3 Central Parks
Public parks, gardens and woods per resident, from each city's own figures, 2023 to 2026. Under each bar: total area, and how many New York Central Parks (341 hectares) that makes. Cities count green space differently, so treat the ranking as approximate.
Why this is happening
- London wins on size. Greater London covers 1,570 square kilometres, with commons, heaths and woods inside its edge. Spread over 9 million people, that is 32 square metres each, behind Berlin, LA and Munich.
- Berlin has forests. More than a sixth of the city is woodland, 15,780 hectares, most of it open to the public. Its parks alone would give each Berliner 14 square metres.
- Paris is packed. It squeezes 2.1 million people into 105 square kilometres, nearly five times as densely as Berlin. Four-fifths of its green space is two woods on the city's edge, the Bois de Boulogne and the Bois de Vincennes.
The take
Most Parisians live far from the two woods. In the rest of the city there are 448 hectares of parks and gardens, about 2 square metres a person, so a crowded city has little green space to cool it in a heatwave or to walk to. Paris plans 300 more hectares of public green space by 2040. Even then it would have about 12 square metres a person, under a quarter of Berlin.