Contributions of green infrastructure to enhancing urban resilience

Abstract

After briefly reviewing key resilience engineering perspectives and summarising some green infrastructure (GI) tools, we present the contributions that GI can make to enhancing urban resilience and maintaining critical system functionality across complex integrated social-ecological and technical systems. We then examine five key challenges for the effective implementation of GI that include (1) standards; (2) regulation; (3) socioeconomic factors; (4) financeability; and (5) innovation. We highlight ways in which these challenges are being dealt with around the world, particularly through the use of approaches that are both context appropriate and socially inclusive. Although progress surmounting these challenges has been made, more needs to be done to ensure that GI approaches are inclusive and appropriate and feature equally alongside more traditional 'grey' infrastructure in the future of urban resilience planning. This research was undertaken for the Resilience Shift initiative to shift the approach to resilience in practice for critical infrastructure sectors. The programme aims to help practitioners involved in critical infrastructure to make decisions differently, contributing to a safer and better world.

A Multidisciplinary Approach to Analyzing Questions of Justice Issues in Urban Greenspace

“…First, most disciplines agree that continuous maintenance is key for ensuring that greenspace remains an amenity to urban residents [39,41,44,46,48]. However, lack of funding and changes in administration makes long term maintenance of greenspace challenging [43], which aligns with previous studies [7,57,58]. It is also challenging to maintain greenspace because the responsibility to First, most disciplines agree that continuous maintenance is key for ensuring that greenspace remains an amenity to urban residents [39,41,44,46,48].…”

“…It is also challenging to maintain greenspace because the responsibility to First, most disciplines agree that continuous maintenance is key for ensuring that greenspace remains an amenity to urban residents [39,41,44,46,48]. However, lack of funding and changes in administration makes long term maintenance of greenspace challenging [43], which aligns with previous studies [7,57,58]. It is also challenging to maintain greenspace because the responsibility to do so is often times not clearly defined.…”

“…However, the task of connecting greenspace cannot be addressed by one discipline alone; it involves urban planners, water managers, urban foresters, conservationists, and visionary landscape architects. Some cities in Europe are pursuing these type of regional planning initiatives aimed to connect larger ecological reserves (e.g., Europe's Natura 2000) [61]. Likewise, water managers in the UK and China are working hard to combine standalone green infrastructure projects into a 'management train' to achieve cumulative benefits for flood management [59].…”

“…Greenspace, seen as parks, sport fields, golf courses, greenways, gardens, green infrastructure, urban forests, tree canopy cover, and vegetation can alleviate some of the negative effects of urbanization and enhance human wellbeing [1][2][3][4][5]. Greenspace also provides many ecosystem services that can help cities adapt to climate change and increase resilience (e.g., improved air quality, reduced flooding risk and heat island effect) [6,7] and provides habitat that supports biodiversity [8]. A decline of greenspace per capita in cities as a consequence of urbanization has reduced opportunities for greenspace [1,9].…”

Interoperability: A conceptual framework to bridge the gap between multifunctional and multisystem urban flood management

“…Urban flood resilience (UFR) is the term commonly used to refer to the whole urban system (i.e., from physical structures to people) and its capacity to cope with flooding, specifically, to maintain significant levels of efficiency in its social, economic, environmental, and physical functions during and after flood events (Balsells et al, 2015;Cousins et al, 2017;Hammond, Chen, Djordjevi c, Butler, & Mark, 2015;OECD, 2014;Parsons et al, 2018;Staddon et al, 2018). An advantage of (re)orienting urban flood management through the concept of resilience (as opposed to flood mitigation only), is that it encourages creative thinking and flexible adaptation strategies focussing on dynamic, systemic, and integrated approaches (Balsells et al, 2015).…”