Preserving ecosystem services in urban regions: Challenges for planning and best practice examples from Switzerland

Abstract

This article presents a literature review that explores the challenges for planning in urban regions in connection with the preservation of ecosystem services. It further presents some best practice examples for meeting these challenges. The demand for the provision of ecosystem services within urban regions changed during the transition from a largely agrarian society to an industrial society and, most recently, to a service society. Although in the past, provisioning services such as food production or the provision of raw material were decisive for urban development, today cultural services, e.g., clear views or nearby recreation areas, have become increasingly important. According to the literature, soil sealing is the greatest threat urbanization poses toward ecosystem services, as it compromises all of them. Spatially extensive cities with a high building density particularly inhibit regulating services like the regulation of temperature or water surface runoff. Conversely, scattered settlement patterns may lead to very small remnants of open space that cannot reasonably serve as natural habitat, agricultural land, or recreation area. The challenges for planning in urban regions are: 1) specifying regulations that define outer limits to the development of each settlement unit, 2) comprehensive planning with focal points for development, and limiting access and development at other places, and 3) compensating for new soil sealing by restoring nearby sealed areas. The article presents 3 best-practice examples that support these principles: designating areas with a particular soil quality that should not be built over, offering incentives for corporate planning in urban regions, and restoring a country road in connection with a motorway construction. Integr Environ Assess Manag 2013; 9: 243–251. © 2013 SETAC

A review of urban ecosystem services: six key challenges for future research

“…Although the notion of ecosystem services and its application to urban environments potentially provides a useful conceptualization for further understanding the human-nature interface (Söderman et al, 2012;Tobias, 2013), its operationalization is fraught with difficulties. In this review we identify some of the operational challenges of urban ecosystem services research.…”

Can Strategic Spatial Planning Contribute to Land Degradation Reduction in Urban Regions? State of the Art and Future Research

“…Specifically, this agenda suggests that strategic spatial planning research must move far beyond the acknowledgement that (i) environmental issues have to be addressed, (ii) sustainable development practices must be implemented, and (iii) strategic spatial plans must be prepared through the involvement of all sectors of society [32,66]. These aspects have been part of the strategic spatial planning discourse for the past 25 years, as the above results demonstrate, yet have had little impact on overturning the progressive degradation of land in urban regions, including the degradation of the most fertile agricultural lands [30,34].…”

“…We have selected urban regions as a spatial scale of analysis because preserving and further valuing ecosystem services is a crucial task in urban regions [30], and because soil sealing, due to urban settlement expansion and infrastructure development, tends to occur on the most fertile agricultural soils [34]. Following the most recent literature [35][36][37][38][39], urban regions are defined in this paper as multi-functional territories composed of a core city (i.e., the urban area) and a surrounding area, with fuzzy boundaries that have statutory meanings (e.g., an institutionalized regional government) or are the result of informal governance arrangements and multi-level government cooperation.…”

The concept of green infrastructure and urban landscape planning: a challenge for urban forestry planning in Belgrade, Serbia

“…Today, more than 80% of the European population lives in cities, which has led to a spatial expansion of cities that is four times greater than the expansion of the population (Poelmans & Van Rompaey 2009, Prokop et al 2011, Tobias 2013. These processes are changing the urban landscape pattern, as can be seen in the homogenisation of the landscape structure (a dramatic expansion of built-up areas and sealed soil - Zonneveld 1995, Rudnick et al 2012) and the functional disintegration of urban landscapes (Antrop & Van Eetvelde 2000).…”

“…Second, a green infrastructure has multifunctional dimensions that are realised through a variety of ecosystem services, which are classified in the MA (Millennium Ecosystem Assessment 2005) as provisioning, regulating, cultural and supporting services. Supporting services maintain other ecosystem services where biodiversity, through natural habitats and the services of their plant and animal communities, has a central role (Tobias 2013).…”