Reorienting urban green infrastructure planning towards biodiversity – Perspectives and ongoing debates from Germany

Abstract

The concept of green infrastructure has the potential to promote planning and implementation of multifunctional green and blue spaces that tackle several urban sustainability issues. Around 2016, German governmental institutions initiated a discourse on green infrastructure as a planning approach at the federal level. This initiative resulted, amongst other, in an urban green infrastructure planning concept tailored for the German planning context. This initial framing of the concept was broad and relatively open. It was supposed to address a wide range of disciplines in field of urban green and blue spaces and integrate their perspectives. In this short communication, we use the example from Germany to discuss how concepts such urban green infrastructure could, or should, evolve in the light of changing socio-political priorities. In response to calls for action on ecosystem and biodiversity loss, we propose shifting the focus of green infrastructure planning explicitly to biodiversity. However, reframing around a specific topic might exclude actors with other priorities and reduce the integrative potential of the concept. Therefore, we suggest how biodiversity can be defined as a cross-cutting issue that creates synergies with other urban sustainability goals such as climate adaptation or social cohesion and avoids narrowing the integrative idea. We use eight best practice cases to illustrate that biodiversity goals can go hand in hand with other urban sustainability goals. Based on these cases, we conclude that urban green infrastructure provides a solid framework that allows a shift in priorities towards biodiversity, while the integrated approach is maintained. These considerations are derived from an on-going research and development project that aims to make the green infrastructure concept actionable for German cities.