Abstract
Concepts such as green infrastructure, nature-based solutions, and ecosystem services gained popularity in recent discourses on urban planning. Despite their recognition as innovative concepts, all of them share a degree of ambiguity. Fuzziness can be a weakness but also an opportunity to shape novel concepts together with the stakeholders that are supposed to implement them in the planning practice. The paper traces concept development processes of green infrastructure through transdisciplinary knowledge exchange in three different projects, a European and a national research project and a local city-regional project as part of an EU regional cooperation project. In all projects, the green infrastructure concept evolved in different stages. Stakeholder involvement during these stages span from consultation to co-creation. The cases reveal two different approaches: concepts that are developed “for planning practice” might be based on a plethora of insight via consultation, while those “with planning practice” foster co-creation and might result in high acceptance among the involved stakeholders. Depending on the purpose of the novel concept, each approach can be beneficial and result in practice-related and operational products, such as guidance documents or planning strategies. However, the cases also show that in any new context an exchange about fuzzy concepts is not only needed but also a chance to stimulate cooperation and joint understanding about urban challenges and how to address them.
Highlights
Based on principles from landscape ecology, green infrastructure (GI) emerged in the 1990s as a planning response to urban sprawl in the USA (Benedict and McMahon 2006; Walmsley 2006)
The concept development process started with a literature review on GI, resulting in a relatively broad spectrum of planning aims and principles and a basic definition of GI that mirrors the general definition of the abovementioned European GI Strategy (“interconnected network of green spaces, which together deliver ecosystem benefits to society” in Davies et al 2015, p. 8; Table 3 and 4 in “Appendix”)
The results demonstrate that knowledge exchange and transdisciplinary cooperation are important at all stages and scales for addressing complex urban issues with GI, ecosystem services (ES), or nature-based solutions (NBS)
Summary
Concepts such as green infrastructure (GI), nature-based solutions (NBS), and ecosystem services (ES) emphasize the importance of nature and its governance as an integral part of sustainable city regions (Nesshöver et al 2017; Pauleit et al 2017; Eggermont et al 2015). Despite this high-level policy support and attention in academia, there is no systematic overview on how the concept has been taken up in planning practice in different European countries during the last ten years (exceptions include Davies et al 2015; Nordh and Olafsson 2020 on Scandinavian countries and reports from single countries such as Lennon 2014 for Ireland or Gavrilidis et al 2020 for Romania) This is complicated by the fact that similar approaches such as ecological networks and green space planning had been implemented before in many countries (Nordh and Olafsson 2020; Grădinaru and Hersperger 2018), p. Conclusions are drawn on how to utilize fuzzy concepts for advancing sustainable planning and environmental governance in urban regions
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