Greenspaces, Green Structure, and Green Infrastructure Planning: Fid-Bau Portal

Greenspaces, Green Structure, and Green Infrastructure Planning

Beer, Anne R. Professor Emeritus

This chapter aims to inform scientists working on urban environmental issues about how the planning process views greenspace. There is now real optimism that town planners and other professionals involved in city planning, and indeed some politicians, have returned to the realization that environmental issues are as important as the social and economic issues that have concerned them most in recent decades. It is well over 20 years since people began to ask questions about how cities could become more sustainable in the way they function (Brundtland, 1987). However, it is only recently, with all the concerns about climate change, that environmental aspects have assumed an overriding importance. Plans based on understanding how the urban environment functions have been lacking, so in many cities we have not made the real changes needed to enhance the environment, for instance, by using the attributes of greenspaces to reduce CO₂ emissions and enhance biodiversity. The question of how the form and functioning of cities can be changed to create the least possible adverse impact on their local environment through the way they are planned, designed, laid out, and managed is only just being asked. With more than one‐half of the world's population now living in towns (UN‐HABITAT, 2008), such changes are crucial. Land use plans must parallel efforts to change social behavior patterns and the way economic decisions are taken, so that less damage is caused to the environment by our actions and so we can build more sustainable cities in the future. Cities can be understood as complex dynamic ecosystems (Tjallingii, 1995; Piracha and Marcotullio, 2003); like all ecosystems they are in a state of perpetual flux (Walker et al., 1999; Scheffer et al., 2001; Steiner 2002). These changes are as much the result of the preexisting landscape and its natural processes attempting to reassert themselves as of the way in which buildings and their associated infrastructure are laid out on the surface and used by the people who inhabit them.