Designing a green infrastructure network for metropolitan areas: a spatial planning approach

Abstract

Climate change and environmental pressures in urban areas have created the need for new concepts and tools for the management of urban development that ensure the protection of natural and cultural resources while also enhancing urban resilience. Green infrastructure (GI) is often associated with sustainable goals that cities strive to achieve through a combination of natural approaches. A key concept in these approaches is the inherent capacity of the natural environment to carry out several functions, meaning that it can provide a variety of ecosystem services and deliver a wide range of policy objectives. Nevertheless, recent studies on the integration of GI into spatial planning have reported limited acknowledgement of the ecosystem services that GI can offer and a lack of a territorial perspective. This paper therefore provides a methodology that facilitates a spatial planning approach to GI planning in metropolitan areas. Based on the definition of GI proposed by the European Commission, which suggests that connectivity and multifunctionality are key to the effective implementation of GI, a two-step methodological approach to GI planning is proposed. This approach is spatially centered, thus promoting the desired territorial perspective, while it also acknowledges the notion of an ecosystem service as a basic design principle. When applied to the metropolitan area of Thessaloniki in Greece, the methodology was found to facilitate the prioritization of competing planning priorities and to promote certain planning objectives, thus enhancing urban resilience and helping to improve the efficiency of land and resource use.