Strategies for urban green infrastructure development – lessons from Europe and Germany

This presentation will give insights in the research process of two projects on urban green infrastructure strategy development — the European FP7 project GREEN SURGE (2014-2017), and the German “Green Infrastructure in Urban Areas”, funded by the German Federal Agency of Nature Conservation (2016). Both projects aimed on the development of urban green infrastructure as a planning concept including planning principles for to tackle urban challenges such biodiversity, climate change adaption, social cohesion, to enhance urban quality, improving human health and wellbeing, and to stimulate green economy. Both projects following a double helix-approach, that is based on collaboration and feedback loops between scientists and practitioners involving so called Urban Learning Labs. The projects results include case study analysis in 10 European cities (Hansen et al. 2016) i.e. 20 German Cities (Hansen et al. 2017), that can be of interest to a broad range of urban stakeholders and practitioners. The presentation will give an overview an overview on results about investigated UGI planning principles that have been discussed within these two projects, such as connectivity, multifunctionality, social inclusion, valorisation, and integration of green and grey infrastructures. Furthermore we will present two products that have been developed within these projects: a planning guidance and an argumentation paper, targeting urban planners and decision-makers that deal with urban green spaces.