Strategies of Urban Green Infrastructure Planning in Existing Cities

Abstract

Year after year, the impacts of climate change become more destructive. Accordingly,
finding the appropriate solutions to adapt with such impacts begins to be a constant concern of many
cities worldwide. In this field, urban green infrastructure or (UGI) provides appropriate solutions for
different climate change impacts such as floods, urban heat island, pollution, drought, water scarcity,
soil erosion, energy deficit, etc. Literature review indicates a limited knowledge about UGI planning
strategies as climate change adaptation (CCA) in existing cities. Accordingly, the current research
seeks to extract these strategies from the real world practices of UGI. The applied methodology is
known as 'learning by doing'. Many eminent practices of UGI planning in existing cities for the
purposes of CCA are selected. A cross analysis is conducted between them to extract their common
UGI strategies. The research's results reveal that the explored practices almost depend on similar
strategies which based on injecting the natural green and blue assets into the exiting urban land uses
such as streets, parking, public buildings, etc. This strategy can be called "urban green injection". So,
the opportunity to have UGI in the crowded cities depends on the innovative investment of the public
land uses and converting them to vegetated or water-covered assets. Following such a strategy can
ensure the alteration of the city image from the traditional natural-lacking character to a more
sustainable and vibrant one. Adopting urban green injection can also ensure the maximum possible
benefit of UGI employing as it was extracted from the successful outcomes of other practices.