Abstract
This article aims to understand how the introduction of blue-green solutions affects ethical concerns and expectations of an urban environment. Blue-green solutions are complementary technical solutions, introduced into urban water management, in order to deal with the impact of urbanisation and climate change. These kinds of solutions establish new affordances that have an impact on everyday life in the urban environment. This article describes how blue-green solutions become part of urban settings and how they influence the inhabitant’s perceptions, desires and matters of care concerning these settings. The article examines the interplay between blue-green technologies and the social, material and cultural context in the Augustenborg district in Malmö, Sweden. The study is based on the analysis of free-text answers to a questionnaire aimed to collect information about the interaction between blue-green solutions and everyday life in public spaces. By exploring the inhabitants’ point of view, the article then seeks to recognise the meanings and thoughts entangled with place concerning different types of blue-green solutions. We summarise the main concerns raised by the inhabitants and discuss how the implementation of blue-green solutions relates to the transformation of everyday ethicalities and matters of concern relating to the neighbourhood. We conclude that blue-green infrastructure seems to come with a new kind of sensitivity, as well as with an intensification of concerns, in an existing urban environment. This has important social repercussions, which also makes it important to study the social role and implications of blue-green technologies further.
Highlights
The climate is changing and intensive and frequent rainfalls have turned urban flood management into a growing concern in urban areas (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2014)
We are interested in the affordances that blue-green solutions bring to the neighbourhood and subsequently how people perceive and care for the affordances
The free-text answers provided a more detailed view of the reasons and motives that brought people to these places. From analysing these answers about respondents’ individual reflection on what blue-green solutions bring that make the areas different from other green urban spaces, four kinds of affordances were identified. These affordances were produced through interactions between different actors and the environment, and here we have focused on those relations that can be associated with the blue-green solutions (Figure 3)
Summary
The climate is changing and intensive and frequent rainfalls have turned urban flood management into a growing concern in urban areas (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2014). Land use competition for different kinds of urban infrastructures seems to be going on, struggling for every free square meter of existing open space. For blue-green infrastructure to hydraulically perform, imposing changes on the urban landscape (e.g., modifying the urban setting, topography, type of vegetation and soil condition) is unavoidable (Backhaus & Fryd, 2013). Making these changes influences the use of urban areas for different users, and increasing our knowledge on the use aspects is necessary for better integration with urban spaces in the future. Non-technical and intangible values need to be better studied and understood to be taken into account in the early stages of planning (Vierikko & Niemelä, 2016)
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