To the author's question of how city dwellers find green space and ecodiversity improvements of this sort - I think it's going to be hard to find anyone who feels these efforts and their results other than a material improvement in quality of life.
What concerns me, though, is that we're recently seeing a pattern, in a lot of neighborhoods, where formerly vacant - and thus vegetated, if not always ideally so - spaces are being bought up cheaply from the city by developers who proceed to fill them to the edges with housing that does not fit the neighborhood, is not welcomed by established residents, and is priced out of reach of anyone save the sort of rich formerly urban professional who has found downtown life insufficiently welcoming once a first child comes along.
That such people do not wish to move to soulless suburbs, I understand - but they seem fine with converting long-extant neighborhoods, with their own unique microcultures and community lives, into exactly that which they seek to avoid. And they seem unconcerned with inflicting the closure and privatization, of what have been de facto common spaces for in many cases decades, to whatever extent is necessary to achieve this short-sighted, ill-conceived, and universally destructive goal.
If anyone has a suggestion on how to deal with that problem, I'd love to hear about it...