Green Infrastructure as an Effective Tool for Urban Adaptation—Solutions from a Big City in a Postindustrial Region

Abstract

Adaptation to climate change is becoming one of the main paradigms for how cities function and develop. The significant role of green infrastructure (GI) as a tool for cities to adapt to climate change is increasingly emphasized among practitioners of spatial planning and in the research literature. Thus, despite the local impact, green infrastructure planning necessitates the creation of a holistic and integrated city management system. The aim of the article is to identify the effects generated by projects implemented in the field of green infrastructure in big cities of post-industrial regions and to formulate determinants and barriers limiting the strengthening of cities’ adaptive capacity to climate change. In the methodological dimension, the article is based on the desk-research method (analysis of project documentation and specialist literature), logical reasoning and the case study method, enriched with a series of interviews and observation of the study area to present the selected projects implemented as part of green infrastructure. Solutions based on nature, green infrastructure and the adaptation of ecosystems are of strategic importance for the challenges of reducing the negative effects of urban heat islands and the risk of flooding, rational space management, regeneration of degraded urban spaces, the coexistence of urban and green space and, consequently, increasing housing, as well as cultural and recreation areas. This is especially true of post-industrial regions, such as the Katowice Conurbation in Poland, to which the examples presented here refer.