Planning for green infrastructure based on integration of multi-driving factors: A case study in pilot site of sponge city

Abstract

The implementation of green infrastructure (GI) is crucial for improving the resilience of cities to the challenges of urbanization and climate change. However, the practicality of GI retrofitting is often neglected in traditional GI planning, which tends to focus mainly on the benefits of GI. In this study, we spatially quantify regional states from six aspects, including stormwater management, air quality, access to green space, urban heat island effect, habitat quality and development level on 1km2 grids. While the first five indicators represent the benefits of GI, the last indicator represents the opportunity cost for GI retrofitting. These regional states are treated as driving factors to sway overall GI planning and are further integrated for synergy and trade-off analysis, priority ranking and grids clustering. The results reveal significant spatial unevenness of regional states, which indicates the necessity for targeted GI planning. The spatial pattern of synergy and priority ranking suggests that the city center in the eastern bank of the river should be prioritized for GI intervention. Adaptive GI strategies are proposed based on the results of grids clustering. The developed approach could be conducive for decision makers in implementing targeted GI planning for responding to spatial unevenness.