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Way back a thousand years ago in February, social media was filled with photos of food in restaurants and outfits worn to go out with other people.

Fast forward to May and people began to post much more about parks, specifically those with natural elements – bushland, birds and water.

“Once upon a time – six months ago – it might not have mattered very much if your local neighbourhood didn’t have a great park or playground or local nature running track,” Neighbourlytics co-founder and chief executive Jessica Christiansen-Franks says.

She and her team analysed “digital chatter” – public social media posts – to determine what we were talking about most during lockdown.

The data analysed written posts as well as images from the inner-urban areas of Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane, and found that each city saw an increase in engagement with natural spaces between February and May – with Melbourne seeing the largest increase of 112 per cent.

“Of the spaces that were available, nature was much more significant to people than the built environment open spaces – particularly in Melbourne. People really yearned for attachment to nature,” Ms Christiansen-Franks says.

Between February and September – the middle of Melbourne’s second, harsher lockdown – the increase was 238 per cent. The data showed during this time engagement with constructed parks and playgrounds decreased by 67 per cent. Playgrounds were closed during this time.

“Connection to natural events like sunsets and dramatic rain clouds and those sorts of expressions of being outside came through very strongly,” Ms Christiansen-Franks says.

“Also people showing natural green spaces – so not necessarily that they’re at the footy oval, but that they’re seeing beautiful gum trees beside the river as they go for their walk.”

She says people were likely to engage with elements that were scarce in their neighbourhoods, citing research her team conducted pre- COVID that found people in areas, including Point Cook, where natural green space was plentiful didn’t value it as much.

“Whereas [people in] Cremorne – which has not even a single street tree – actually see a lot of value in that. When they do see it, it delights them and is important to them,” she says.

So where can we get more of this space in the inner city? We’ve seen the residents of suburbs such as Northcote take over golf courses and now it’s been suggested that schools offer up their ovals, but Tract Consultants principal town planner Adam Terrill says there are even more opportunities to give Melburnians more of the nature they crave.

“There’s other surplus government land you could look at – surplus railway land, surplus road land and racecourses,” he says. “The government owns huge swathes of land across the state and some of it is not needed for the use it was intended for.”

He said some of this land (including that used for other purposes, such as racecourses, golf courses and schools) could have a “dual purpose” – used for public open space when not needed for their primary function.

“It’s very expensive and very difficult to create new open spaces in the inner city because land values are so high,” Mr Terrill says. “If you can start with government land, that becomes a lot easier.”

He says there’s also some opportunity to create smaller parks which only take up a few blocks, particularly in inner suburbs where large scale projects are often not possible.

“I think we need to re-discover the pocket-park,” he says. “That land’s already owned by the government; sometimes all that’s needed is for a fence to be taken down and for the council to invest in some basic landscaping.”

But he says, before all this, Melbourne needs an “open space plan” to identify areas that need more. He says the goal should be for most Melburnians to have open space in walking distance from home – which is classified as a five-minute walk – or 400 metres in distance.

“We now need to move beyond the objective into the implementation of it and focus in on the areas where people might be walking one or two kilometres or even not having a park within walking distance,” he says.

“I don’t think a city is delivering for its residents if people have to hop in a car to get to their local open space.”