Liveable Green Cities: Integrating Climate Adaptive Solutions and Circular Economy into the Built Environment

Abstract

The increased number of people living in urban areas requires rethinking what liveable cities are about. Within the next decade both climate change and the shortage of resources on water, energy and nutrients will have strong impacts on the urban environment. The big challenge is to create ‘healthy cities’. Bringing landscape to the cities can strongly contribute to making cities healthier, more resilient, and more vibrant to accommodate all their citizens. The key to this new perspective is how to create healthy cities in densely built areas and strengthen the urban metabolism, while also addressing externalities, such as the urban heat island effect, increased storm events and sea-level rise. The objective of this chapter is to gain insight in the new complexity that arises from the increasing relevance of landscape and planting in dense urban environments in order to set a contemporary agenda for urban green space design. The increasing need to develop healthy, circular and climate adaptive cities leads to new demands on urban green spaces. By rebalancing traffic in cities, a vibrant and green public realm can be realised. Rebalancing transportation and shifting to multimodal mobility has a large impact on the spatial quality of cities and provides access to all. The public realm can be transformed into a green and blue network and set the scene for vibrant city centres. The complexity that arises from the new demands on green space in dense urban environments is explained through the analyses of four case studies in Rotterdam, Athens, London and Utrecht, combined with literature reviews. These four ‘research by design’ projects are discussed and evaluated to reveal the increasing (societal) relevance of urban green space. These projects offer new perspectives on the integration of climate adaptive design and circularity. Toolboxes for heat mitigation and water-sensitive design are developed and applied in these designs. Today’s imminent need to increase the degree of self-sufficiency within city limits and regions, as well as climate adaptation, requires continuous monitoring of the level of incorporation of the different aspects of ‘healthy living’ into the realized development and assessment of the standards each year. Adding today’s aspirations for including biodiversity, calls for the idea of ‘urban biotopes’, turning the green into an urban ecosystem that can evolve over time. It requires careful considerations about how to balance energy generation and green, and how to integrate underground infrastructure, to make sure that proper conditions for urban green are set.