Green Infrastructure: Current Debates for Policy, Practice and Implementation

Our understandings of the landscapes around us are constantly changing. How we interact with, manage and value these spaces is important, as it helps us to ensure we live in attractive, functional and sustainable places. Green Infrastructure planning is the current ‘go-to’ approach in landscape planning that incorporates human-environmental interactions, understandings of ecology and how socio-cultural factors influence our use of parks, gardens and waterways. This book explores several interpretations of Green Infrastructure bringing together case studies of policy, practice, ecological change and community understandings of landscape. Focusing on how planning policy shapes our interactions with the landscape, as individuals and communities, the book discusses what works and what needs to be improved. It examines how environmental management can promote more sustainable approaches to landscape protection ensuring that water resources and ecological communities are not harmed by development. It also asks what the economic and community values of Green Infrastructure are to illustrate how different social, ecological and political factors influence how our landscapes are managed. The central message of the book focusses on the promotion of multi-functional nature within urban landscapes that helps people, the economy and the environment to meet the challenges of population, infrastructure and economic change. The chapters in this book were origianally published as a special issue in Landscape Research.

Table of Contents:
1. Green infrastructure: reflections on past, present and future praxis Ian C. Mell 2. The emergence of green infrastructure as promoting the centralisation of a landscape perspective in spatial planning—the case of Ireland Mick Lennon, Mark Scott, Marcus Collier and Karen Foley 3. Urban green infrastructure and urban forests: a case study of the Metropolitan Area of Milan Giovanni Sanesi, Giuseppe Colangelo, Raffaele Lafortezza, Enrico Calvo and Clive Davies 4. Can we face the challenge: how to implement a theoretical concept of green infrastructure into planning practice? Warsaw case study Barbara Szulczewska, Renata Giedych and Gabriela Maksymiuk 5. Siting green stormwater infrastructure in a neighbourhood to maximise secondary benefits: lessons learned from a pilot project Danielle Dagenais, Isabelle Thomas and Sylvain Paquette 6. Italian stone pine forests under Rome’s siege: learning from the past to protect their future Lorenza Gasparella, Antonio Tomao, Mariagrazia Agrimi, Piermaria Corona, Luigi Portoghesi and Anna Barbati 7. Defining community-scale green infrastructure Gemma Jerome 8. Common economic oversights in green infrastructure valuation Alexander Whitehouse 8. Conclusion: What next for Green Infrastructure? Ian Mell

About the Author :
Ian Mell is a Lecturer in Environmental & Landscape Planning (University of Manchester). He researches human-environmental interactions exploring social, economic and ecological valuation of Green Infrastructure in the UK, EU, USA, and Asia. Ian is the author of Global Green Infrastructure: Lessons for successful policy-making, investment and management (2016, Routledge).