Residents’ Willingness to Participate in Green Infrastructure: Spatial Differences and Influence Factors in Shanghai, China

Abstract

Green infrastructure (GI) plays a fundamental role in achieving urban pluvial flood management, mitigating urban heat island effect, and improving living suitability. Residents’ participation is the main driving force of GI implementation. Based on semi-structured interviews, GIS spatial analysis, and multiple regression, we investigated residents’ willingness to participate in the implementation of GI in public and private space and identified the influence factors in Shanghai, China. The results show that, compared with private space, residents prefer to implement GI in public space, where they have different preferences of GI measures. On urban scale, residents’ willingness to participate in the implementation of GI in private space is characterized as “high in the inner city, low in the suburban areas”, while the spatial difference is insignificant for public space. In addition, the factors affecting residents’ willingness to participate in the implementation of GI are different in private and public space. The deterministic factors of GI participation are gender, education level, and floor for private space, while only include building age for public space, in addition to the common factors of free time, cognition of GI, perception of pluvial flood risk, supportive factors, and environment-improving factors that can influence both private and public space GI participation. Our analysis therefore provides valuable information for policymakers concerning nature-based solutions to climate change adaptation and urban sustainability.

Mitigation of Urban Pluvial Flooding: What Drives Residents’ Willingness to Implement Green or Grey Stormwater Infrastructures on Their Property?

“…Firstly, as far as overall stormwater infrastructure implementation is concerned, the analysis performed here finds that 43% are willing to implement at least one type, but just 21% are willing to implement at least one type of GreenSIs. These results are almost in line with those observed by Yu et al [10], who focus on Shanghai City, and by Baptiste et al [47], who consider Syracuse, NY (USA). According to the former study, around 31% of people are willing to implement GreenSIs in private space.…”

“…According to the latter, a moderate willingness to implement GreenSIs is observed. In general terms, willingness to implement stormwater infrastructures seems to be greater when considering public interventions than private ones [10,35].…”

“…With regard to the Veneto Region, a survey conducted by Weyrich et al [2] shows that an increased perception of vulnerability increases people's motivation to protect themselves, at least for those who have already undertaken some types of structural interventions. Lastly, Yu et al [10], who just focus on GreenSIs, claim that those people with a greater perception of pluvial flood risk are more prone to implement future green interventions.…”

“…However, when specifically focusing on stormwater infrastructures, a still limited number of studies investigate the factors affecting stakeholders' behavioural intentions or the limitations and barriers to implement adaptive measures. When exploring the willingness to implement stormwater infrastructures by residents, scholars distinguish the factors affecting the citizens' intentions at the private property scale (small scale) from that at neighbourhood/public spaces scale (urban or peri-urban large scale) [10]. However, more case studies address large scale contexts than small scale private contexts.…”

“…To cope with this risk, stormwater infrastructures have been demonstrated to be effective in reducing the risk of pluvial flooding in urban areas, and they are generally classified into green and grey stormwater infrastructures (GreenSIs and GreySIs), depending on whether or not they include vegetation [9]. An increasing strand of the literature is focusing on citizens' attitudes towards stormwater infrastructures, although many studies have focused on the willingness to implement them in a public context, rather than on private properties [10]. Moreover, little attention is paid to pluvial flooding adaptation measures, when compared to river flooding ones.…”