Abstract
Green infrastructure is a strategically planned network of natural and semi-natural areas, including green and blue spaces and other ecosystems, designed and managed to deliver a wide range of ecosystem services at various scales. Apart from the ecological functions, green infrastructure, as a planning tool, contributes to social and economic benefits, leading to the achievement of sustainable, resilient, inclusive and competitive urban areas. Despite recent developments, there is still no consensus among researchers and practitioners regarding the concept of green infrastructure as well as its implementation approaches, which makes it often difficult for urban planners and other professionals in the field to develop a robust green infrastructure in some parts of the world. To address this issue, an integrative literature review was conducted to identify which green infrastructure planning principles should be acknowledged in spatial planning practices to promote sustainability and resilience. As a result of this literature review, the most common eight green infrastructure planning principles were selected—connectivity, multifunctionality, applicability, integration, diversity, multiscale, governance, and continuity. These principles intend to promote and simplify the development and use of green infrastructure by different academic and implementation organizations and provide a more defined model for sustainable landscape management in order to help practitioners and decision makers during the conceptualization and planning of green infrastructure.
Highlights
In 2018, more than 4 billion people lived in urban areas, and, according to the United Nations [1], the urban population will increase by 2.5 billion by 2050
These reasons conditioned the selection of green infrastructure planning principles, and only a total of eight principles were identified in this research, which include the more traditional ones, addressed in the early stages of green infrastructure research, as well as new principles that arise from recent developments regarding green infrastructure planning
If we examine closely the definition of green infrastructure—“a strategically planned network of natural and semi-natural areas designed and managed to deliver a wide range of ecosystem services”—it is possible to see that both multifunctionality and connectivity principles are embedded in this description, which reinforces the important role these principles have in green infrastructure planning
Summary
In 2018, more than 4 billion people lived in urban areas, and, according to the United Nations [1], the urban population will increase by 2.5 billion by 2050. Urban areas contribute significantly to climate change, since they are responsible for greenhouse gas emissions [4], as well as other man-made activities, such as agriculture. To address these challenges, several nature-based solutions and ecosystem services strategies have been developed across the world, that simultaneously contribute to human well-being and environmental protection [5,6,7,8,9], such as, for example, green infrastructure implementation. This document groups ecosystem services in the categories previously presented—provision, regulation and cultural—but the “support”
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