Rethinking the ‘green city’ – contemporary research, teaching, and practice in urban greening

Abstract

To fully appreciate the breadth of what ‘landscape’ means in different contexts requires a continual examination of how alternative approaches to landscape teaching, research and policy are integrated. To better understand such diversity asks us – as landscape professionals – to challenge our disciplinary, geographical, and political views and engage with new ideas, theories, and techniques. This includes reflections on biodiversity, climate change, heritage, and design in considerations of how we teach future landscape professionals to think about these issues in a holistic way. This special issue of Landscape Research addresses these thematic areas via a series of papers developed following the Newton Fund supported ‘Rethinking the Green City’ workshop held in Brasilia in 2019. Each paper questions about how we locate ‘green’ ideas in praxis to promote more sustainable forms of planning and asks us to think about the choices we make when discussing socio-cultural, economic, and environmental aspects of landscape.

Keywords:

• Urban greening
• education
• landscape
• design
• collaboration
• heritage

As we become an undeniable urban society the ways in which we design, plan, and manage our cities becomes increasingly critical. This requires us all to reconsider the approaches taken to designing in nature, promoting inclusivity, and ensuring that the provision and quality of public spaces are balanced at all stages of the urban planning process. If the proportion of the world’s urban population hits 60% by 2030 (and indeed 70% by 2050), as predicted by the UN (United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs and Population Division, 2022), then urban planning will need to fundamentally change to find ways to address the extra environmental capacity and physical space needed to support this transition.

Historically, such a shift has been problematic with environmental capacity issues being allocated secondary importance compared to commercial, transport and residential needs (Dobson & Dempsey, 2021; Gurrutxaga, Marull, Domene, & Urrea, 2015; Ling, Handley, & Rodwell, 2007). Expansion through land use change has, as a consequence, been driving principles in the master planning of cities in Europe, North America and increasingly Asian and African nations. Numerous examples including Phoenix (USA), New Delhi (India) and São Paulo (Brazil), illustrate the problems associated with rapid expansion at the expense of ecological functionality pointing to the need to rethink how built infrastructure can be re-considered from a ‘green’ or sustainability perspective to promote the creation of more resilient places (Mell, 2019; Moraes Victor et al., 2004; Pauleit et al., 2015).

Moreover, as we move into an era where climate and biodiversity emergencies, public health epidemics, and socio-economic inequality are becoming increasingly common components of urban debates there is a need to rethink how we use and manage urban systems – especially with respect to environmental capacity. The rise of green infrastructure (GI) planning and more recently Nature-Based Solutions (NBS) as options for the enhancement of a greater proportion and more diverse range of green and blue spaces into urban areas has focussed these discussions on the delivery of spaces that offer multi-functional benefits to society, the economy, and the environment (Escobedo, Giannico, Jim, Sanesi, & Lafortezza, 2019). However, there remains a reluctance in some political and development spheres to support the transition towards greener development practices due to issues of knowledge exchange, technological understanding, or cost. Consequently, we can identify problems associated with the ongoing conversion of ecological resources into impermeable grey infrastructure, for example, the redevelopment of public parks or floodplains to facilitate transport infrastructure or the delivery of housing (Che, Zhao, Yang, Li, & Shi, 2014; Xing, Jones, & Donnison, 2017).

It is within this space that we must ensure that new academic and practice-based voices are visible, engaged, and able to challenge the orthodoxies of existing landscape and urban planning practice. This is especially critical where people have been excluded from these debates due to their gender, age, income, nationality or ethnicity (Curran & Hamilton, 2018; Hood & Tada, 2020). Thus, the foregrounding of under-represented authors from outside of established research networks is needed to integrate the wealth of locally contextual knowledge that is currently less visible in academic discourses. Furthermore, the inclusion of all members of society in such debates helps to facilitate a rethinking of the reasoning behind the historical denial of the benefits associated with access to nature including health and well-being, economic and social benefits, that have in some cases been systematically denied in historical planning narratives (Venter, Shackleton, Van Staden, Selomane, & Masterson, 2020).

To encourage these debates this special issue of Landscape Research draws on the outcomes of the Newton Fund supported ‘Rethinking the Green City’ (https://rethinkingthegreencity.weebly.com/) workshop held in Brasilia in April 2019. The workshop brought together established and early career urban and landscape researchers based in UK and Brazilian institutions to share experiences from Brazil, England, Ireland, Northern Ireland, Spain, the USA, and Wales and consider how best to advance green city ideas and support the shift towards a nature-first or landscape-led form of urban planning. The workshop’s central aim was to showcase contemporary thinking, research and practice highlighting how ‘urban greening’ within its widest conceptual framing is being used to shape contemporary teaching and research. The discussion of past, current, and future trends in urban and landscape planning within the workshop illustrated the opportunities available to researchers to create new relationships across geographic boundaries, for example the UK-Brazilian collaboration of Hoyle and Sant’Anna (2020, this issue) in this special issue. Moreover, the event provided space to explore the conceptual and thematic limitations of work in the UK, Brazil and internationally to promote greater collaboration between participants.

The teaching and research of environmental planning, landscape architecture, planning and urban design therefore hold a central role in facilitating such changes. Each of the authors in this special issue are based in departments that teach the above subjects, and work with colleagues across academia, practice, and policy to ensure the contemporary issues of inclusion, diversity and sustainability are being embedded in planning and decision-making. All are therefore concerned with promoting knowledge exchange between multiple stakeholders in a variety of geographical and disciplinary contexts to promote contemporary research and new landscape practices. The bringing together of the papers in this special issue supports this process. They are also part of a new generation of thinkers that includes Meerow (2020), Keleg, Butina Watson, and Salheen (2022), Clement (2021), and Ordóñez et al. (2019), who are all examining ‘landscape’ from a number of alternative conceptual, geographic, epistemological, and socio-cultural perspectives and aim to shape contemporary praxis. Landscape Research is therefore a suitable home for these discussions, and it is hoped that the papers presented here will spark further debate. Although this special issue does not propose a new or universal doctrine for what a ‘green city’ is, it does illustrate the breadth of research, opportunities for knowledge exchange and pedagogical innovation being undertaken to engage with issues of urban greening. This helps us to reiterate the need to make explicit links between policy and practice and promote the added-value of integrating academic thinking from diverse geographical backgrounds.

This special issue of Landscape Research is populated with contributions from participants at the Rethinking the Green City workshop. 50 early career researchers attended and were invited to submit papers examining contemporary landscape issues. In total five papers written by eight workshop attendees located in seven academic institutions in the UK and Brazil are presented. Each of the papers focuses on a different aspect of landscape research, teaching, and planning, however, all address a combination of issues impacting upon the liveability of urban areas. These include issues associated with urban design, the inclusion of more biodiverse and climate resilient landscapes, human health and well-being, the role of innovation in the teaching of landscape/urban design to the next generation of urban specialists, the role of heritage in understanding of place in our appreciation of aesthetics and functionality, and the use of landscape as a facilitator of recreation and economic development opportunities. Furthermore, within all the papers landscape is presented as a foundational resource that can, and should, be used to shape better design, planning, and management. The multifaceted nature of landscape should also drive advances in teaching to help train future professionals. Each of the authors therefore argue that landscape is not as an afterthought in urban planning debates but are a critical resource that needs to be nurtured to promote socio-economic, ecological, and cultural sustainability.

Hoyle and Sant’Anna (2020, this issue) open the special issue debating these ecological aspects with an examination of how climate change, biodiversity and health are being integrated into a series of projects in Brazil, Italy, and the UK. Their analysis asks questions of what type and composition of species are most appropriate within a given location and reflects on how increased ecological diversity can address both the climatic problems associated with homogenous urban environments, e.g. uniform city developments in the UK, to promote an improved quality of life and place. Using the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park (formally the London 2012 Olympic Park), urban meadows in Bedfordshire (England), the greening of grey/built infrastructure in Sheffield, the Biblioteca degali Alberi and Boco Verticale in Milan, and the Costa, Niemeyer and Marx ‘Pilot Plan’ for Brasilia as examples they debate how issues of scale, composition, diversity of species, the role of aesthetics, functionality, and the management of urban form with additional ecological interventions all support an acknowledgement of the added-value of urban greening. In each case study they also highlight the potential tensions between different stakeholders, existing versus contemporary approaches to biodiversity in urban planning, and the need to consider current and future uses of a space when designing in nature. They conclude with a call for more synergistic thinking between disciplines to effectively include considerations of how we adapt cities to changing climate circumstances. This is needed to ensure that planners have an awareness of the role of biodiverse landscapes in promoting health and well-being, and understand the ways that nature can be used to align the principles of urban planning, engineering, and landscape professionals to locate ecological thinking at the centre of development debates.

The paper by Paulo Barros, Vikas Mehta, Paul Brindley and Razieh Zandieh previously published in Landscape Research (2021, 46:7) addresses a comparable issue to those discussed by Hoyle and Sant’Anna but focus on the potential restorative effect of urban greening on commercial streets in the USA (Boston) and Brazil (Belo Horizonte). Using aspects of Stress Recovery Theory (SRT) and Attention Restoration Theory (ART) they argue that most cities are unable to find space for or afford to invest in new large-scale public and/or green spaces, and therefore streets can play an important role in providing places of interest, hospitality, permeability, and socio-economic and ecological functions. Using a triangulated method of interviews with users of selected researched streets, observations, and analysis of Flickr images of streets in Boston and Belo Horizonte they explored how street configurations and human-scale greenery influence perceptions of hospitality and comfort, as well as those that appear well-cared for were perceived to have a greater restorative impact. Additionally, Barros, Mehta, Brindley, and Zandieh (2021) also propose that permeability, a personalisation of the streetscape, and the presence of well-maintained natural features all support restorative activities. The paper goes on to argue that high-quality environmental and urban design can act as a facilitator of use helping to activate the street scene through opportunities for increased interaction. They also note that streetscapes can be designed with urban greening, e.g. street trees, to more effectively buffer users from the noise and pollution caused by traffic. However, they caution that street design needs to be locally contextual and consider the nuances of local use and the needs of user groups to have a positive restorative impact.

The third paper from de Freitas (2021, this issue) continues the theme of design outlined by Barros et al. (2021). The focus of de Freitas’s paper centres on the teaching of urban design and the shifts in pedagogical approaches being tested in Federal University of Minas Gerais. The paper raises questions of whether ‘design studio culture’ hinders good urban design, and if so, can a focus on green infrastructure, landscape scale design, or more community led thinking provide pathways for innovative design teaching. The approach proposed by de Freitas mirrors changes in the ways in which the Belo Horizonte Metropolitan Region approach planning placing a greater emphasis on institutional and territorial thinking using four strategic themes/axes: accessibility, safety, sustainability, and urbanity to shape praxis. These four axes were used as thematic design principles to structure studio briefs enabling students to focus their thinking on real-world issues. It also ensured that designs mapped effectively onto city-scale objectives supporting the translation of studio-based work with practice. Moreover, working on catchment-scale/green infrastructure issues allowed students to both problematise and find solutions to issues of significant socio-economic/ecological concern. When coupled with additional studio modules centred on direct engagement with communities’ students gained first-hand experience of how conceptual ideas can be evaluated in practice. The outcomes of these studio experiments included an acknowledgement of the limitations associated with developing design solutions that integrate a sense of place, green infrastructure, that align with policy/planning guidelines, and that are respective of inputs from local stakeholders. Therefore, de Freitas argues that there remains room for improvement in studio teaching. To achieve this, he argues that landscape and urban designers need to work more closely with communities, engage with a wider set of design principles, and promote additional engagement with other disciplines to support ongoing innovation in design studio teaching.

Taking a more historical perspective the discussion of Peel Park in Salford (England) presented by Hayes and Dockerill (2020, this issue) highlights the value of archival research when evaluating current trends and practices in urban greenspace funding and management. Their paper explores the creation of Peel Park in the 1840s and contrasts this to its refurbishment in the early 2000s identifying a comparable set of guiding principles, namely the civic value of a ‘park for the people’, the use of non-traditional, i.e. private and not local government funds to support investment, and proposes the view that in both the 1800s and 2000s that a civic duty to develop spaces, especially green and blue spaces, that are attractive, free to access, and functional for all remains visible. Through their analysis they highlight an entrepreneurial municipalism from Salford City Council in its approach to funding as they sought philanthropic subscriptions in the 1840s and engaged with charitable funding (Heritage Lottery Fund) and developer contributions (S106 agreement payments) in the 2000s. Hayes and Dockerill go on to argue that the development of public parks has been viewed, and remains, a mechanism to ‘right the wrongs’ of development especially those that excludes some of society’s most vulnerable. They conclude that whilst private payments for public amenities may lead to a particularistic shaping of place that examples like Peel Park highlight a continuity of civic appreciation of the value of parks give to society. Finally, they note that parks should not be viewed as ‘the solution’ to problems associated with community cohesion. With careful planning and engagement parks can though act as focal points for numerous communities of interest including of neighbouring University of Salford, residents, and landscape historians.

The final paper discusses the impacts of tourism in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro and is presented by Fagerlande (2022, this issue). The paper discusses research in three favelas and the challenges they face in balancing tourism and economic development opportunities with environmental management. Fagerlande contextualises this against a discussion of the development of Rio and the rising disparity in access to housing and other resources which led, in part, to the development of favelas. The paper subsequently situates tourist activities in the favelas of Rio against a wider debate focussed on ‘poverty tourism’ to argue that the impacts of tourists can be positive, e.g. self-autonomy and economic opportunities for local communities, as well as negative, e.g. voyeurism/privacy, exploitation, and safety issues. However, the paper goes on to note that when greener/sustainable favela tourism was linked to wider city/metropolitan approaches to economic development that it led to an increase in visitor numbers and by association a need for additional infrastructure needs, e.g. accommodation, to service the increased tourist numbers. This includes an increase in ecological/green favela tours that utilise visits to woodlands as part of the favela experience. The paper also explores the ecological disservices of tourism, i.e. environmental degradation, but notes that local-level entrepreneurship has seen ecological restoration being undertaken by favela residents. Fagerlande cautions though that such activities remain subject to complex and changing relationships between residents, non-governmental organisations, and the city government of Rio. Furthermore, Fagerlande examines the problems associated with a lack of formal recognition of land rights for people living in favelas and highlights the ongoing role of local community organisations in protecting both livelihoods and environmental resources. Acknowledgements from the city government regarding the ecological importance of favelas has aided the recognition of such rights and led to new economic and tourism-related opportunities being developed.

From the collective reading of the diverse papers presented in this special issue a key theme that can be drawn is the need to promote knowledge exchange between people, places, and disciplines. Although each paper talks to a specific theme, and therefore audience, they all provide signposts that could support collaboration between academics, practitioners, and decision-makers locally, and internationally. We can thus argue that the integration of a critical level of thinking focussed on issues of biodiversity, design, economic development, and climate needs to be located within considerations of teaching, research, and practice. Moreover, the contextualisation of current practice requires an appreciation of the historical understandings of place to ensure that mistakes in function and design are not repeated, and that knowledge is communicated effectively across geographic, scalar, and generational boundaries. The papers also challenge some of the orthodoxies related to how we view specific locations, i.e. favelas or streetscapes, enabling us to consider our disciplinary limitations to support the inclusion of alternative assessments of place. This is a key message for landscape research, as we seek to ensure that diverse perspectives and new voices in the field are heard. Thus, contemporary discussions of landscape design choices, history of place, perceptions of biodiversity, and the alignment of real-world praxis with pedagogical innovation are needed to shape the future of landscape thinking.

The papers presented, therefore, provide contemporary case studies to further the debate regarding how urban greening, GI or NBS can or should be used to structure development. They also provide an alternative lens through which green or sustainable cities can be considered. The five papers of this special issue do not propose to revolutionise how we view ‘green cities’ but provide opportunities to rethink whether, and is so, how innovations in teaching, policy, practice, and research can be linked. They also promote the inclusion of multi-generational, formal, and informal insights into landscape research to progress what, where, how, and who we focus on. Such a position transcends a single location, discipline, or approach but sits at the heart of what Landscape Research and the authors of this special issue aims to achieve.

Acknowledgements

The catalyst for this special issue was a Newton Fund Researcher Links Workshop Rethinking the Green City supported event held in Brasilia in 2019.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ian Mell

Ian Mell is Reader in Environmental and Landscape Planning at the University of Manchester. He teaches and researches green infrastructure planning focussing on design, development, funding, and policy. His work is informed by experience in local government planning and looks at how green and blue space is developed in the UK and globally. He is the author of Global Green Infrastructure (2016, Routledge), Green Infrastructure Planning: Reintegrating Landscape in Urban Planning (2019, Lund Humphries), and Planning with Landscape: Green Infrastructure to Build Climate-Adapted Cities (Sant’Anna, Mell & Schenk, 2023, Springer).