Urban Green Infrastructure in the Global South

New criteria for sustainable land use planning of metropolitan green infrastructures in the tropical Andes

Context

Urbanization is rapidly increasing worldwide, with about 60% of the global population currently residing in cities and expected to reach 68% by 2050. In Latin America's tropical Andes region, managing these changes poses challenges, including biodiversity loss and vulnerability to climate change.

Objectives

This study assesses urban growth and agricultural intensification impacts on the ecological functionality of metropolitan green infrastructures and their capacity to provide ecosystem services using a landscape sustainability and sociometabolic approach. Specifically, it aims to identify landscape configurations promoting socio-ecological sustainability amidst rapid urbanization.

Methods

A landscape-metabolic model (IDC) was applied to evaluate the interactions between land use changes and ecosystem functions in the metropolitan region of Cali.

Results

Agricultural intensification and industrialization, coupled with uncontrolled urban growth, have significantly transformed the landscape, posing threats to its sustainability. The prevailing biocultural landscapes hold a substantial potential to provide essential ecosystem services to the metropolis. The IDC offers an approach that utilizes a land cover map and agricultural production/metabolism data to calculate an indicator closely related to ecosystem services and multifunctionality.

Conclusions

The IDC model stands out for efficiently capturing landscape dynamics, providing insights into landscape configuration and social metabolism without extensive resource requirements. This research highlights the importance of adopting a landscape-metabolic and green infrastructure framework to guide territorial policies in the tropical Andes and similar regions. It stresses the need for informed land use planning to address challenges and leverage opportunities presented by biocultural landscapes for regional sustainability amidst rapid urbanization and agricultural expansion.

Priming Engineers to Think About Sustainability: Cognitive and Neuro-Cognitive Evidence to Support the Adoption of Green Stormwater Design

Green infrastructure is the application of nature-based solutions like bioswales, rain gardens, and permeable pavements to reduce flooding in urban areas. These systems are underutilized in the design of the built environment. A barrier to their implementation is that design engineers tend to discount the tangential benefits of these greener systems and overweigh the associated risks. This study tested whether priming engineers to think about the environmental and social sustainability benefits of green infrastructure can influence what attributes engineers consider and how they weigh these attributes during the design decision-making process. Forty engineering students trained in stormwater design were asked to evaluate the implementation of a conventional stormwater design option and a green stormwater design option. Their preferred design option was recorded and the changes in their neuro-cognition were measured using functional near infrared-spectroscopy. Half of the engineers were asked to first consider the potential outcomes of these options on the environment and the surrounding community. Priming engineers to first consider environmental and social sustainability before considering the cost and risk of each option, significantly increased the perceived benefits the engineers believed green infrastructure could provide. The priming intervention also increased the likelihood that engineers would recommend the green infrastructure option. The engineers primed to think about environmental and social sustainability exhibited significantly lower oxy-hemoglobin in their ventrolateral, dorsolateral, and medial prefrontal cortex through multiple phases of the judgment and decision-making process. The intervention appears to increase cognitive representativeness or salience of the benefits for green infrastructure when engineers evaluate design alternatives. This relatively low-cost intervention, asking engineers to consider environmental and social sustainability for each design alternative, can shift engineering decision-making and change neuro-cognition.

Assessing Inequalities in Wellbeing at a Neighbourhood Scale in Low-Middle-Income-Country Secondary Cities and Their Implications for Long-Term Livability

To ensure future sustainability, cities need to consider concepts of livability and resident wellbeing alongside environmental, economic and infrastructure development equity. The current rapid urbanization experienced in many regions is leading to sustainability challenges, but also offers the opportunity to deliver infrastructure supporting the social aspects of cities and the services that underpin them alongside economic growth. Unfortunately, evidence of what is needed to deliver urban wellbeing is largely absent from the global south. This paper contributes to filling this knowledge gap through a novel interdisciplinary mixed methods study undertaken in two rapidly changing cities (one Thai and one Kenyan) using qualitative surveys, subjective wellbeing and stress measurements, and spatial analysis of urban infrastructure distribution. We find the absence of basic infrastructure (including waste removal, water availability and quality) unsurprisingly causes significant stress for city residents. However, once these services are in place, smaller variations (inequalities) in social (crime, tenure) and environmental (noise, air quality) conditions begin to play a greater role in determining differences in subjective wellbeing across a city. Our results indicate that spending time in urban greenspaces can mitigate the stressful impacts of city living even for residents of informal neighborhoods. Our data also highlights the importance of places that enable social interactions supporting wellbeing-whether green or built. These results demonstrate the need for diversity and equity in the provision of public realm spaces to ensure social and spatial justice. These findings strengthen the need to promote long term livability in LMIC urban planning alongside economic growth, environmental sustainability, and resilience.

Using green infrastructure to stimulate discourse with and for planning practice: experiences with fuzzy concepts from a pan-European, a national and a local perspective

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.