Organizers/chairs:

• Olga Likhacheva (Pskov State University, Russia), olga.lich@mail.ru
• Anton Shkaruba (Estonian University of Life Sciences, Tartu, Estonia), anton.shkaruba@emu.ee

Green and Blue infrastructure for re-naturing cities is a planning approach with a long history. The value of open spaces with vegetation for neighbourhood liveability was recognised decades ago, as reflected in several generations of planning textbooks, and in planning forms of many cities, such as e.g. in «water and green diameters» of fUSSR cities created in the 1970-80s, “green belts” in the UK and the Netherlands or the “finger plan” of Copenhagen. With the global environmental change recognised and operationalised, green and blue also became associated with concepts of “resilient”, “climate-neutral”, “climate-friendly”, “adaptive” etc cities. City re-naturing became visible in planning agendas and international literature as well, as urban and territorial planning were absorbing concepts of ecosystem services and nature-based solutions (NBS), while attracting and maintaining wild nature to/in cities. A raise of green and blue in city planning discussions and agendas took different or even contrast forms on the ground, due to diverging planning and management priorities. For instance, in most countries within the former USSR, on one hand, there are many incentives to maintain green spaces in cities and to develop NBS (e.g. cultural & recreational needs of citizens, sanitary requirements and building rules & standards, well-advertised best international practices appealing to the youth etc), but on the other hand, they often crash into the economic and planning realities as well as cultural perceptions & behavioural deadlocks. As commonly observed in the Global North, NBS do not appear to deliver on their promise, because either the expectations were unreasonably high, or the implementation was poor or compromised due to conflicts with competent authorities or expert groups overseeing infrastructure safety, sanitation or environmental quality.

Keeping this background information in mind, we invite speakers addressing the following or related issues:

• Perception of “green & blue” in urban landscape by citizens: what they want, what they get, and how we learn
• Dilemmas between “green & blue” and “cheap & neat”: planning priorities and quality of urban landscapes
• Enabling and disabling conditions for the development of “green & blue” in urban environments
• Urban wildlife and quality of urban environments: a multistakeholder perspective
• Management of green & blue infrastructure and NBS, including promotion and access
• Knowledge transfer, applicability and replicability of nature-based solutions

Co-organised by Erasmus+ Jean Monnet activity EARth

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The programme of the session is available here.

The proceedings of the event is available here.