Residents’ Willingness to Participate in Green Infrastructure: Spatial Differences and Influence Factors in Shanghai, China

Yang Yu,Hui Xu,Jiahong Wen,Shiqiang Du,Min Zhang,Qian Ke,Xiaohan Wang

doi:10.3390/su11195396

Abstract

Green infrastructure (GI) plays a fundamental role in achieving urban pluvial flood management, mitigating urban heat island effect, and improving living suitability. Residents’ participation is the main driving force of GI implementation. Based on semi-structured interviews, GIS spatial analysis, and multiple regression, we investigated residents’ willingness to participate in the implementation of GI in public and private space and identified the influence factors in Shanghai, China. The results show that, compared with private space, residents prefer to implement GI in public space, where they have different preferences of GI measures. On urban scale, residents’ willingness to participate in the implementation of GI in private space is characterized as “high in the inner city, low in the suburban areas”, while the spatial difference is insignificant for public space. In addition, the factors affecting residents’ willingness to participate in the implementation of GI are different in private and public space. The deterministic factors of GI participation are gender, education level, and floor for private space, while only include building age for public space, in addition to the common factors of free time, cognition of GI, perception of pluvial flood risk, supportive factors, and environment-improving factors that can influence both private and public space GI participation. Our analysis therefore provides valuable information for policymakers concerning nature-based solutions to climate change adaptation and urban sustainability.

Highlights

In the context of climate change and rapid urbanization, pluvial flooding has posed an increasing challenge for urban sustainability and residents’ well-being [1,2,3]
The willingness of residents to participate in the implementation of green infrastructure (GI) presents the following characteristics: (1) In general, the level of willingness to participate in the implementation of GI in public space is higher than that in private space (Figure 3)
Higher education level and larger family size are more willing to participate in the implementation of GI. (4) The residents living on higher floors show lower willingness to participate in the implementation of GI in private space, but higher willingness in public space

Summary

Introduction

In the context of climate change and rapid urbanization, pluvial flooding has posed an increasing challenge for urban sustainability and residents’ well-being [1,2,3]. Nature-based solutions represented by green infrastructure (GI) to address the issues have been highlighted internationally in achieving ecosystem’s flood regulation service (EFRS) [4,5,6,7,8,9]. Beauchamp and Adamowski [11] reviewed GI development and management in Europe and North America, indicating that GI has a potential for aesthetics and psychological benefits. GI is widely recognized and practiced, with various adaptive measures, such as rain garden, roof greening, residential rain collection facilities, and permeable pavement, to achieve on-site management of pluvial flooding through soil and vegetation natural processes [12,13,14,15]. GI is relatively fast, low-cost, and has broad public appeal [18,19]

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Conclusion