Green Infrastructure (GI) is an increasingly popular means of dealing with flooding and water quality issues worldwide. This study examines public perceptions of, and behaviour around, bioswales, which are a popular GI facility in the United States. Bioswales are highly visible interventions requiring support from residents and policy‐makers to be implemented and maintained appropriately. To understand how the residents' perceptions and attitudes might develop over time, we interviewed residents of Portland, Oregon, living near bioswales installed 1–2, 4–5 and 8–9 years ago, to determine awareness, understanding, and opinions about the devices. We found no consistent patterns across time periods, but did find common issues affecting residents' appreciation and acceptance: environmental attitudes, awareness and understanding of purpose and function, plant choice and maintenance, and mess and littering. It was apparent that increased public engagement, localised maintenance strategies, and possibly even customising facilities to meet residents' needs where feasible, might improve acceptance.
A Blue-Green City aims to recreate a naturally-oriented water cycle while contributing to the amenity of the city by bringing water management and green infrastructure together. The Blue-Green approach is more than a stormwater management strategy aimed at improving water quality and providing flood risk benefits. It can also provide important ecosystem services and socio-cultural benefits when the urban system is in a non-flood, or green, condition. However, quantitative evaluation of benefits and the appraisal of the relative significance of each benefit in a given location are not well understood. The Blue-Green Cities Research Project aims to develop procedures for the robust evaluation of the multiple functionalities of Blue-Green infrastructure (BGI) components within flood risk management (FRM) strategies. The salient environmental challenge of FRM cuts across disciplinary boundaries, hence an interdisciplinary approach aims to avoid partial framing of the ongoing FRM debate. The Consortium will produce an urban flood model to simulate the movement of water and sediment through Blue-Green features. Individual and institutional agents will be incorporated into the model to illustrate how behavioural changes impact on flooding and vice versa. A methodological approach for evaluating the interaction of urban FRM components with the wider urban system will be developed and highlight where, when and to whom a range of benefits may accrue from BGI and other flood management interventions under non-flood and flood conditions. Recognition of the compound uncertainties involved in achieving multiple benefits at scale will be part of the robust method of uncertainty evaluation that will run throughout the project. The deliverables will be applied to the Demonstration Case Study, Newcastle, UK, in the final year of the project (2015). This paper will introduce the Blue-Green Cities Research Project and the novel, interdisciplinary framework that is adopted to investigate multiple benefits of FRM strategies.
The UK's National Adult Learning Survey has emphasised that graduates are more likely than other groups of people to engage in further learning, and to be motivated by the intrinsic nature of the subject matter. However, beyond this we know relatively little about the learning of graduates as a specific group. In particular, we know very little about how experiences of higher education affect attitudes towards learning in the years after graduation. To start to redress this gap, this paper draws on in-depth interviews with 90 graduates from six different UK higher education institutions, five years after they completed their first degree. It argues that, in the case of many of these young adults, the influence of higher education on further learning was exerted at three levels, in relation to: the process of learning; the construction of learner identities; and understandings of the relationship between learning and the wider world.
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