Greening Blocks: A Conceptual Typology of Practical Design Interventions to Integrate Health and Climate Resilience Co-Benefits.

Sara Barron,Erin Desautels,Stephen R J Sheppard,Angie Woo,Sophie Nitoslawski,Kathleen L Wolf

doi:10.3390/ijerph16214241

Abstract

It is increasingly evident that exposure to green landscape elements benefits human health. Urban green space in cities is also recognized as a crucial adaptation response to changes in climate and its subsequent effects. The exploration of conceptual and practical intersections between human health, green spaces, and climate action is needed. Evidence-based guidance is needed for stakeholders, practitioners, designers, and citizens in order to assess and manage urban green spaces that maximize co-benefits for both human health and climate resilience. This paper proposes interventions that provide strategic green space enhancement at the neighborhood and block scale. We propose eight tangible green space interventions and associated metrics to integrate climate resilience and population health co-benefits into urban green space design and planning: View from within, Plant entrances, Bring nature nearby, Retain the mature, Generate diversity, Create refuge, Connect experiences, and Optimize green infrastructure. These interventions represent a hierarchy of functional design concepts that respond to experiential qualities and physical/psychological dimensions of health, and which enhance resilience at a range of social scales from the individual to the neighborhood. The interventions also reveal additional research needs in green space design, particularly in neighborhood-level contexts.

Highlights

Urban green spaces, understood to be areas comprised of vegetation and other natural elements, play an important role in helping cities transition to more resilient, healthier, and sustainable futures.Green space may include parks, community gardens, greenways and trails, stormwater systems, and tree-lined streets [1]
We present a typology of novel interventions that provide critical functions through synthesis of the qualitative, tangible, and holistic aspects of neighborhood green spaces, with a focus on elements of urban forests and associated vegetation (Table 1)
The first is the need to consider green space co-benefits for improving both human health and climate resilience

Summary

Introduction

Understood to be areas comprised of vegetation and other natural elements, play an important role in helping cities transition to more resilient, healthier, and sustainable futures. Green space may include parks, community gardens, greenways and trails, stormwater systems, and tree-lined streets [1]. Urban forests are included in this definition, as trees can serve as both structural and organizing elements within urban green landscapes [2]. Urban forests and green spaces provide a suite of benefits and services to city dwellers towards climate resilience [3,4,5]. Along with other nature-based solutions, meaning the strategies that use nature to some degree to address environmental challenges [6], urban forests and green spaces are increasingly recognized as a necessary intervention in the global dialogue on climate solutions.

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