The multifaceted geographies of green infrastructure policy and planning: socio-environmental dreams, nightmares, and amnesia

Of what ‘green infrastructure’ do we dream?

Infrastructure lies at the heart of many disputes within environmental policy and planning. Take for example recent proposals for massive federal investments in infrastructure in the United States. These investments promise climate resilience, secure jobs, and large improvements in environmental quality occurring alongside a new era of public lands policy. Despite these lofty goals, fierce debate rages over the relationship between infrastructure spending, social wellbeing, and economic performance. Within these debates, some have argued for a deeper inclusion of ‘green infrastructure’ (GI), as a key component of sustainability transitions. And yet, debate continues over what GI is and how it should be implemented.

Existing scholarship makes clear that GI means different things to different individuals and institutions. Deeply contested, GI manifests via varying conceptual orientations: through a water/stormwater management approach, an urban ecology/ecosystem services approach, a landscape conservation/greenspace planning approach, and integrative approaches across these overlapping orientations (Matsler et al., 2021; Szulczewska et al., 2017). Even within each of these conceptual orientations, significant differences exist in the scope and interpretation of what constitutes GI (Wright, 2011). These are not simply epistemological issues related to disciplinary silos; rather they stem from incompatible ontologies over what type of work should be expected from ecosystems, and its close corollary, the nature of the relationship between humans and landscapes (Gabriel, 2014; Gandy, 2002; Wachsmuth, 2012). Like many issues facing sustainability policy, these ontological concerns do work beyond the abstract, revealing the radically different and often alienated experiences of humans with each other and their resident ecosystems (Grabowski et al., 2019).

Ontological instability adds considerable confusion to the implementation and practice of GI. The GI concept was originally popularized as a way to connect various ecological habitat types – such as street trees, forest patches, parks, restored streams, and floodplains – in a cohesive planning framework to provide multiple benefits (Benedict & McMahon, 2001). In practice however, GI is more often implemented to address specific and singular purposes: for example, GI is built as an engineering solution for stormwater (Fletcher et al., 2015) or flood (Thorne et al., 2018) management, or entangled with political solutions to ‘undesirable’ land uses as in the case of clearing slums (Millington, 2018) and redevelopment of vacant properties (Schilling & Logan, 2008). In each of these cases, significant conflict exists over what counts as ‘green infrastructure’ to meet the socially defined goals driving urban and infrastructure redevelopment.

In addition to different conceptualizations of what biophysical elements are considered ‘part of’ GI, GI is also socially and politically mutable. This instability presents itself as a contradiction of meaning (Mell & Clement, 2020), of research focus (Matsler et al., 2021), and of scope of planning (Grabowski et al., in press). Far from abstract concerns, the social and technological work that GI is expected to do runs the gamut from reducing crime (Burley, 2018; Kuo & Sullivan, 2001), increasing property values (Netusil et al., 2014), and improving mental health (South et al., 2018), while cost-effectively providing traditional infrastructural services (i.e. stormwater management [Keeley et al., 2013]). And yet others find that GI can accelerate gentrification (Gould & Lewis, 2017) and further entrench patterns of uneven development (Anguelovski et al., 2016). Thus, as GI has been implemented in an increasing number of contexts, many planners and engineers perpetuate the original idea that all GI installations are multifunctional socio-ecological conduits where the system is more than the sum of its parts. However, GI is rarely, if ever, monitored or tested for such outcomes in situ and therefore many installations may not deliver on promises of multifunctionality or even have a ‘net positive’ impact on communities; instead GI can manifest as ‘greenwashing’ of business-as-usual – oftentimes deeply problematic – development practices.

What is shared across various approaches to GI is that they each turn nature into infrastructure, often in an attempt to address critical sustainability and resilience challenges. As scholars in the field of science and technology studies (STS) have shown, transforming nature into infrastructure always requires simultaneous transformation of social and technological systems, often through new forms of politics and expertise (Beck et al., 2021; Carse, 2012). GI then, provides an excellent lens for viewing looming and persistent issues at the intersection of environmental and infrastructure governance. The articles in this special issue expose the importance of social-political systems of governance to the outcomes and impacts of infrastructural innovation, using GI as a site of inquiry. Our collective focus is on the tensions in existing systems of planning and policy as they grapple with a new concept while attending to inextricable concerns of social equity. Can these systems deliver on their dual mandates of equitable and environmentally-friendly forms of infrastructure? Or do they require a deeper transformation to achieve their social goals and enable new forms of relationship with the environment? Looking across the papers gathered in this special issue, we see that the answer to our first question appears to be a resounding ‘no’, with the second question being answered by a resonant ‘yes,’ spurring a need for transformation in existing policy and planning.

In the search for a transformative approach, the authors collected in this special issue speak to existing practices of planning for and implementing GI, offering practical pathways forward for planners and policy makers. Much of the work here is place-based and all is grounded in the study of practitioners’ tacit knowledge and experiences; they bring real and tangible case studies, surveys, and reviews to bear on hard questions of on-the-ground infrastructure governance: How may GI transform the social, ecological, financial, and technological systems of cities? What inequalities and injustices may be addressed or exacerbated? What new forms of bureaucracy and finance do GI policies and programs require? Whose conceptualization of GI shapes existing planning and policy and what traditions and practices have been omitted or ignored?

One person’s dream is another’s nightmare

The work gathered here pays careful and rigorous attention to the embedded inequalities and injustices within larger systems of GI governance, identity, and underlying ontologies; and illuminates the urgent need to improve and expand inclusive community involvement in these systems. This special issue focuses our attention as a community of interest on the power relationships that are shaping predominant approaches and moral ontologies of GI planning and policy, and their mixed results on the physical manifestation of GI in different contexts. While many of these manifestations reflect the ‘dreams’ of GI discussed above, they also present burdens in specific contexts. Many of these burdens are extensions of entrenched urban disparities. For example, a wide-reaching plan review by Hoover et al. (2021) examines how the guiding logics and prioritization mechanisms of GI plans conflict with nascent efforts to address equity and justice concerns in the context of persistently racialized place-making. Walker (2021) continues this dialogue by revealing how GI planning contributes to perpetuating housing injustice through spatial analysis of the linkages between gentrification and green stormwater infrastructure (GSI) investments. They highlight a specific municipal water quality project in which affordable public housing was bulldozed to create stormwater ponds, displacing residents. Additionally, Tomateo’s (2021) analysis of indigenous contributions to GI networks from the deep past to the present highlights the conflicting moral ontologies of current GI planning that lay bare the larger power conflicts driving conservation and infrastructure development agendas in Peru.

Each of these analyses of urban inequities and injustices reflect deep processes of racialized capitalism, directly examined in Heck’s (2021) analysis of how GI fits within institutionalized forms of racial oppression shaping the distribution of urban hazards and amenities, building evidence that traditional forms of infrastructure financing perpetuate power imbalances and systemic inequalities. These findings are supported by Mell (2021), who shows how existing policies attempt to weave together disparate framings of the value of urban nature and the environment to attract multiple funding streams and render the practice more financially sustainable. And Cousins and Hill (2021) reveal an increased intertwining of municipal environmental risk with municipal financial risk through the expansion of financial mechanisms used to fund GSI, which has been shown to disproportionately burden already marginalized and at risk populations.

These ‘nightmares’ of GI policy and planning make clear the continued hegemony of technocratic processes in environmental policy and planning. Walker (2021) examines the increase in technocratic processes in GSI planning in Minneapolis explicitly in relation to increases in gentrification. Riedman’s (2021) examination of the gendered and racialized compensation of labor in GSI development also implicitly offers insightful comment on this technocratic trend. In response to this trend, Hoover et al. (2021), Tomateo (2021), and Gerlak et al. (2021) each highlight community engagement in GI planning and policy as critical to realizing the potential for multifunctionality from GI implementation. Gerlak et al. (2021) specifically focus on learning as a key process in this engagement and find that experimentation by actors and communities plays a key role in developing the knowledge, skills, and trust needed to facilitate this learning. Overall, these papers clearly display a need for explicit consideration of systemic inequality in infrastructural policy and planning and, despite a common misconception of its inherent social value, show that GI is not excused from perpetuating this ‘nightmare’ because it is ‘green’.

Overcoming amnesia

The work collected here also makes clear that much of GI planning and policy suffers from a historical ‘amnesia’. An ecological amnesia of shifting baselines obscures the ecological richness of the pre-industrialized world, and leads to a willingness to trade slight improvements in environmental quality for an ever more entrenched urban and infrastructural form (Manuel-Navarrete et al., 2019). Part of this ecological amnesia is a persistent and often violent dismissal of indigenous ways of knowing landscapes. Tomateo (2021) highlights this omission and provides a deeply transformative paradigm for GI practice, one which roots emergent GI policy in Peru in indigenous conceptualizations and relationships that have built complex infrastructure systems since time immemorial. However, they show that ‘modern’ infrastructure ideals of networked yet siloed systems continue to drive infrastructure planning and policy amidst a backdrop of indigenous systems of landscape care. From a different perspective, Cousins and Hill (2021) examine the role of fees and financing in overcoming ecological amnesia in the United States. They interrogate the various fee and financial structures used by municipalities to fund GI and examine how these may coincide with the often frequent disconnect between municipal climate change planning and municipal stormwater planning. They argue that understanding how and for what purpose new fee and financial structures are used to address the risks of stormwater provides insight into who is being provided with associated benefits and who is being left out.

Ecological amnesia is closely related to social amnesia. The violent processes of constructing urban inequality are often discussed in the past tense, as outside the scope of current planning and policy (Laws 1994). When past harms are addressed, they are often done so through a form of positive and restorative justice. For GI, these reparations most often take the form of ‘targeted investment’ whereby communities disproportionately and negatively impacted by prior planning and policy are now targeted for further ‘beneficial’ interventions. And yet, if the literature and articles in this issue are any guide, it is specifically these types of targeted investments that have accelerated housing displacement and reinscribed uneven forms of risk on the urban landscape. For example, Heck (2021) examines a city-funded GSI pilot project in St Louis using a lens of equity and racial capitalism that foregrounds the ways that development proceeds at the expense of the poor and people of color without consideration of ongoing histories of environmental justice. They argue that the pilot project under study was made possible through the area’s unacknowledged history of racialized land development and is being used to save the city money without addressing broader needs for the redistribution of resources and power. ‘Amnesia’ of past injustices of redlining and zoning facilitates the utilization of ‘blighted’ and ‘abandoned’ spaces for GSI development. Further, Walker (2021) finds that implementing GSI in areas where cities are already planning redevelopment is more affordable and so often goes in tandem with gentrification. They examine the relationship between GSI and gentrification in Minneapolis, a city with some of the most striking racial disparities in the United States and find that processes of gentrification are intertwined with GSI installation and caution that this exacerbates existing inequalities as GSI benefits are enjoyed primarily by wealthier residents. Hoover et al. (2021) look at the justice implications of siting criteria in GI planning while recognizing both the potential services and disservices of GI. They argue that locating GI in low income and minority neighborhoods, without an explicit focus on justice, may deepen existing inequalities and actually harm those communities. As such, they recommend siting GI in communities that want it, taking into consideration the local historical context, and making plans to address potential negative impacts such as displacement. Riedman (2021) examines this ‘amnesia’ as well by looking at the disproportionate volunteer labor requested and contributed by Black women to GSI in Detroit. They explore the disconnect between the unpaid volunteer labor requested and contributed by primarily Black women to installing small-scale GSI with the well-compensated work of government-employed, primarily white males, planning and constructing gray infrastructure. We have seen this all before, and the authors mentioned here push through this ‘amnesia’ by placing GI in the context of deep-rooted histories of injustice.

In examining pathways to overcome ‘amnesia’, Gerlak et al. (2021) note a growing recognition in policy and governance of the importance of equity in GI access and distribution. They examine the role of agency and governance in urban transformation through GI within the context of Tucson, AZ by examining the diverse and interconnected roles of entrepreneurs working in GI, providing insights into how they learn from each other and across scales. Mell (2021) examines the possibility for aligning economic and socio-ecologically focused stakeholders around GI and notes the importance of partnerships as a driver of GI innovation. They identify three funder groups and note a focus on the economic value of GI as particularly effective at creating a bridge between stakeholders.

Germinal work on the concept of GI promised a systemic and systematic approach to planning the relationship between infrastructure and ecosystems. However, in practice we find that GI often privileges the pre-existing goals of traditional infrastructure planning, particularly stormwater management. Even when applied as an ecological concept, advocates for ecological urbanism must compete against powerful interests seeking to treat urban space as the antithesis of nature; urbanity becomes defined by ‘built’ nature and its seeming independence from natural forces, forgetting its roots as a constructed expression of a relationship between humans and the ecological world.

Visions of the future

What do we take away from the compelling research gathered in this special issue? First and foremost, we see that ‘good greening’ – i.e. good GI practice – must be done in conversation with context (both social and ecological context) to avoid unmet promises and perverse outcomes. While GI has the potential to provide localized benefits to communities, the way it is conceptualized and historically situated is inseparable from its form, distribution, and maintenance, all of which greatly influence the functions and benefits it provides. This contextual nature of GI is rarely discussed in the GI literature as much of the research is focused on understanding how specific facility types provide specific services or how programs are promoted and received by populations.

Flowing from this first insight, we find a second: the systems of decision making of the past that have created the present are no longer sustainable. There is a cogent presentation of evidence throughout this special issue that the varying biophysical systems of GI are inseparable from the different social processes they perpetuate, especially legacies of injustice embedded in methods of technocratic policy and planning.

This leads to a final insight: supporting community leadership on GI decision-making is critical to ensuring the outcomes of GI policy and planning actually align with the goals of GI policy and planning on-the-ground. Often greening is implicitly thought of as inherently sustainable or resilient because it is ‘green’ 2021. But this special issue highlights the nuance involved in greening and expands our understanding of the uncomfortable reality that ‘green’ is not always a ‘dream-come-true’. Simply asking communities to be included in the current dominant modes of GI planning is asking them to be complicit in their own displacement. To more comprehensively and more justly provide community benefits, GI planning and policy must provide resources to communities to serve as their own experts when addressing the intersectional issues of housing, environmental quality, and urban hazard management, which includes a willingness to explore alternative options to addressing the problems at hand.

In the current uncontrolled experiment of runaway climate change and rampant social inequality, the question remains: how socially and ecologically ‘rooted’ will our systems of infrastructural policy and planning be in the face of unprecedented stressors? We would be wise to pay attention to how ancient systems continue to persist and resist overt and epistemological colonization, and how we can decolonize exploitative paradigms and institutions in shaping the future of infrastructure today. It is clear that planning and policy-making must become more open, led by the people they ostensibly intend to serve, and must address deep seated inequalities in political and social power maintained by present forms of decision-making.

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Notes on contributors

A. Marissa Matsler

A. Marissa Matsler is post-doctoral researcher at the University of Maryland, College Park. Her general research focus is improving interdisciplinary methods for understanding social-ecological-technological systems (SETS). Her current work examines green infrastructure policy and municipal asset management innovation in US cities through a SETS lens.

Zbigniew J. Grabowski

Zbigniew J. Grabowski is a post-doc at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies and the Urban Systems Lab at the New School - where working with Drs. Steward T.A. Pickett and Timon McPhearson - he examines the equity of green infrastructure planning in US Cities. He is also an Adjunct Assistant Professor at Portland State University and Eastern Connecticut State University where he teaches on Global Water Systems, Sustainability, Human-Nature Relations, and Environmental Policy.

Alison D. Elder

Alison D. Elder is a PhD student and National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow in the School of Geography, Development & Environment at the University of Arizona. Her research interests include green infrastructure, sustainable development, environmental governance, public private partnerships, equity, and water.