ISSN: 2222-6990
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Rapid urbanization and climate change have exacerbated the vulnerability of urban areas to more frequent and severe flooding. Due to the lack of recent studies on the emerging trend of mitigation action to enhance flood resilience in cities, a thematic review was conducted to explore a more impactful flood mitigation strategy through leveraging urban open spaces for flood resilience in cities. A six-step methodology was employed to perform the thematic analysis, beginning with screening and selecting relevant articles published between 2018 and 2024 from four selected databases: Web of Science (WoS), Scopus, Emerald Insight, and ScienceDirect. Following code creation and theme identification, the findings derived from the code-to-document analysis were assessed using ATLAS. Ti software version 8. Based on the results, the search string yielded 141 peer-reviewed journal articles, of which 72 were selected after applying inclusion and exclusion criteria and further evaluated via quantitative and qualitative analysis. Accordingly, these studies placed significant emphasis on three main themes: open space strategy (56 codes), elements of open spaces (39 codes), and challenges of open space (20 codes). Overall, the comprehensive analysis of successful interventions in this thematic review offers new insights and valuable guidelines for policymakers, urban planners, and practitioners seeking to leverage urban open spaces to enhance flood resilience in cities, especially those that persistently face the impact of climate change.
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