Policies and Planning of Urban Green Infrastructure and Sustainable Urban Drainage Systems

Abstract

Green infrastructure (GI) is increasingly recognized as a planning and design approach to ensure the provision of a broad set of ecosystem services in cities, as well as a way to make the concept of urban resilience fully operational. Multifunctionality is the most recognizable feature of GI, ensuring the provision of different ecosystem services and benefits, including storm water regulation, the reduction of social vulnerability, green space, air quality, mitigation of urban heat island effect and landscape connectivity. GI design has recently embraced resilience purposes and started to generate different urban policies that try to address a wide range of environmental issues. Among the different types of urban GI, sustainable urban drainage systems (SUDS) represent solutions that use natural processes to comply with the principles underlying the adaptive flood management, enabling the shift towards a more sustainable handling of storm water. This chapter focuses on different approaches concerning the adoption of GI in cities and particularly focuses on SUDS. Various policy tools (regulatory instruments, market-based incentives, educational and training programs) are introduced. By comparing experiences that promote a nature-based drainage approach to address urban transformations, this chapter also analyses barriers, challenges and lessons learned about the implementation of GI and SUDS in both new and existing urban developments.