Green infrastructure (GI) has become a panacea for cities working to enhance sustainability and resilience. While the rationale for GI primarily focuses on its multifunctionality (e.g. delivering multiple ecosystem services to local communities), uncertainties remain around how, for whom, and to what extent GI delivers these services. Additionally, many scholars increasingly recognize potential disservices of GI, including gentrification associated with new GI developments. Building on a novel dataset of 119 planning documents from 19 U.S. cities, we utilize insights from literature on justice in urban planning to examine the justice implications of criteria used in the siting of GI projects. We analyze the GI siting criteria described in city plans and how they explicitly or implicitly engage environmental justice. We find that justice is rarely explicitly discussed, yet the dominant technical siting criteria that focus on stormwater and economic considerations have justice implications. We conclude with recommendations for centering justice in GI spatial planning.

Managing stormwater and wastewater has been a priority for cities for millennia, but has become increasingly complicated as urban areas grow and develop. Since the mid-1800s, cites often relied on an integrated system of underground pipes, pumps, and other built infrastructure (termed gray infrastructure) to convey stormwater away from developed areas. Unfortunately, this gray infrastructure is aging and often exceeds its designed capacity. In an effort to alleviate issues related to excess stormwater, many urban areas across the United States are interested in using green infrastructure as a stopgap or supplement to inadequate gray infrastructure. Green infrastructure and other greenspace promote interception and/or infiltration of stormwater by using the natural hydrologic properties of soil and vegetation. Furthermore, there are numerous ancillary benefits, in addition to stormwater benefits, that make the use of greenspace desirable. Collectively, these ecosystem services can benefit multiple aspects of a community by providing benefits in a targeted manner. In this paper, we present a framework for balancing stormwater management against ancillary benefits of urban greenspace. The framework is structured around the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment ecosystem service categories: provisioning, cultural, regulatory, and supporting services. The purpose is to help communities better manage their systems by 1) allowing stakeholders to prioritize and address their needs and concerns within a community, and 2) maximize the ecosystem service benefits received from urban greenspace.

In this perspective, we argue that creating the positive outcomes socio-ecological researchers and practitioners seek for urban areas requires acknowledging and addressing the interactions of race and systemic racism in parks, open and green spaces. Racial experiences are inseparable from physical landscapes and the processes of designing, managing, or studying them. From COVID-19 to the Black Lives Matter movement and protests, the events of 2020 in the United States underscore how considerations of social justice must extend beyond the conventional distributional focus of environmental justice. It must incorporate an understanding of how the built environment is racialized spatially, but not always readily quantified through the proximity-based measurements frequently used in research and practice. The perspective is organized in three main parts. The first part presents a series of vignettes to frame the ways cities and individuals participate, respond, and interact under COVID-19 with racial segregation as the backdrop. The second part suggests a stepwise approach to building an understanding of racial inequities in socio-ecological systems (SES) research and practice including four entry points: (1) racialized spatial distribution of hazards and amenities, (2) racialized qualities of space, (3) racialized people in space, and (4) racialized creation of space. Finally, the third part proposes actions the SES community can take to enhance our commitment to community recovery, improvement, and thrivability. This perspective cautions practitioners and researchers against opportunistic or quick-fix solutions, and instead challenges our colleagues to be inclusive of disenfranchised voices in shaping socio-ecological goals, now more than ever. The goal of this perspective is to spark engagement with power and privilege in parks and open space using the example of COVID-19 and race in the US.

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Green infrastructure (GI), practices consisting of using vegetation and soil to manage stormwater runoff (e.g., rain gardens, vegetated roofs, bioswales, etc.), has been adopted by cities across the world to help address aging water infrastructure, water quality, excess water quantity, and urban planning needs. Although GI's contribution to stormwater control and management has been extensively studied, the economic value of its benefits is less known. In Omaha, NE, GI projects have been completed in several public parks. Using a repeat-sales model based on 2000-2018 housing data, we examined the effect of GI on the value of single-family homes within various buffer distances of parks where GI was installed. After controlling for changes associated with home deterioration and renovation, non-stationary location effects, and time-invariant characteristics, we did not find any statistically significant relationships between housing values and GI. This finding is consistent with the notion that homeowners place little value on modifications to existing greenspace, but may also stem from homeowners' lack of familiarity with GI practices or data limitations.