Abstract
The increasing interest in urban nature and its connection to urban sustainability and resilience has promoted the generalized use of new concepts such as green infrastructure, ecosystem services and nature-based solutions. However, due to their heterogeneous origins and interpretations, the usage and understanding of these concepts may vary considerably between different academic and professional groups, affecting their coordinated and synergistic use in integrative planning education and emphasizing the need for the exploration of clearer syntaxes and articulations between them. Accordingly, the main aim of this research was to develop a relational model and to investigate, through an external evaluation process, the benefits that these types of models can provide in higher education and in professional practice. This article presents the background theory and process that led to the development of the relational model, the outcomes of its academic implementation and the results of the assessment of both the model and the students’ work by different types of planners, researchers and practitioners. The findings show the potential of the defined relational model to integrate different concepts operating in complex socio-ecological systems and the benefits of developing, testing and validating models by linking research, education and professional practice.
Highlights
As presented in this introductory section and according to literature, the development of novel urban nature concepts has generated conceptual and operational challenges affecting the understanding of their mutual interconnections and their combined use in education and practice
The presented results correspond to the three research questions which originated in the conducted research and were explored through the three research methods explained in the previous section
This research shows the benefits of defining relational models to work in research, education and practice, with different and interconnected concepts operating in complex systems
Summary
As presented in this introductory section and according to literature, the development of novel urban nature concepts has generated conceptual and operational challenges affecting the understanding of their mutual interconnections and their combined use in education and practice. Despite the numerous definitions of urban green infrastructures (UGI), ecosystem services (ESS), nature-based solutions (NBS), urban sustainability and urban resilience, the formation of durable terms and a consistent grammar between them often escapes the boundaries of conventional academic and professional disciplines. This situation becomes noticeable in complex socio-ecological systems such as urban areas, where planning increasingly needs to deal with an expanding number of drivers, objectives and interests and in which systems thinking and multidisciplinarity, interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity still challenge pre-existing ways of researching and working [1]. In the best case these models can function as a point of departure for theory building and have heuristics value” [5] (p. 8)
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