Green Infrastructure (GI) has gained importance in recent years as it has been revealed as an essential piece to face the environmental problem generated by the incessant growth of urbanization, loss of biodiversity, and climate change. In this vein, the results of a research aimed at investigating the challenges posed by the implementation of the GI in the usual compact urban spaces in the cities of the Mediterranean area are presented, based on the analysis of indicators on green spaces in the Spanish city of Pamplona. A comparative analysis of the indicators (green spaces and trees) in the city’s neighbourhoods using GIS tools reveals the high intra-urban inequalities as well as the existence of, particularly, underfunded areas. The morphological analysis of one of the underfunded spaces (La Milagrosa neighbourhood) also shows that the narrowness of the road and the shortage of green spaces constitute obstacles that must be addressed from the planning tools of the GI. The results allow us to reflect on the importance of the scale of analysis in the planning processes of the UGI (Urban Green Infrastructure) and on neighbourhood the suitability of Nature-based Solutions (NbS) as an alternative for the design and implementation of the UGI.
City densification and greening are two priority urban-policy objectives, for the coming years, aimed at making cities more resilient to climate change, slowing the spread of urbanization and improving the quality of life in cities. These are sometimes contradictory objectives that require fine and deep analysis to create approaches and methods that combine them. The most recent research has presented so-called small urban green spaces (SUGSs) as a viable alternative to achieve this double objective. This was the starting point of this research, which used GIS digital analysis and microscale fieldwork to study the possibilities of greening an excessively dense and low-quality urban space in the city of Pamplona (Spain). The results thereof showed that the urban structure of this neighbourhood contains a large number of small spaces with no specific use or function—residual, surface and vertical spaces—and that are simply undefined remnants between buildings and streets, or party walls that were never built. Only these surface spaces occupy a total area that is twice the size of the existing green spaces. Based on these results, this work explores the possibility of increasing the green areas of the neighbourhood through new SUGSs and the creation of a green corridor that increases environmental and social connectivity and the quality of life in the studied space.
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