The concept of green infrastructure and urban landscape planning: a challenge for urban forestry planning in Belgrade, Serbia

Abstract

The beginning of the 21 st century has witnessed a growth in our understanding of the importance of planning urban landscapes in the context of urban population growth and unpredictable climatic conditions. In the search for responses to the challenges set by the development of contemporary urban landscapes, researchers have offered solutions based on the concept of sustainable and resilient cities, whose spatial development would be based on an interdisciplinary approach to strategy development: biodiversity, urban ecological networks and connectivity, multifunctionality and modularity. Although the concepts of a green infrastructure, in their spatial and functional dimensions, allow the application of such strategies, there are still problems when it comes to implementation and measuring the results achieved. At the same time, there is a growing discussion of the important role played by urban forestry in the context of the collaborative planning of urban landscapes and the application of the ideas of a green infrastructure. The key question is: what are the modalities of application of the concept of green infrastructure in the process of planning the development of the modern city and how can the resulting benefits be evaluated? With the modalities of application of the concept of green infrastructure in mind, we discuss its multi-scale and multifunctional dimensions as applied in the case of Serbia. The realisation of the green infrastructure concept is presented through the example of the Urban Forest Management Plan for the City of Belgrade -Mladenovac Municipality. The results of using the spatial-ecological approach in creating the plan and establishing connectivity as a new aim in forest management planning show that the implementation of the green infrastructure concept, and the achieved multifunctional ecosystem values, can be presented on the basis of the parameters of landscape metrics. In light of the new urban world, future research should focus on the application of the landscape ecological approach of the green infrastructure concept in collaborative planning at the urban landscape scale, which allows the creation of ecosystem services and benefits to human wellbeing.

A Planning Support Tool for Layout Integral Optimization of Urban Blue–Green Infrastructure

“…Among them, stormwater management and drainage (SMD), ecological connectivity promotion (ECP), and heat island effect mitigation (HIEM) belong to the category of environmental services, while recreation opportunity creation (ROC), public vitality enhancement (PVE), and city identity interpretation (CII) are included in the category of public services (Table 1). PA reflects the level of species diversity that determines the patch value to be protected and connected [38,39]; ENN mainly determines the cost and feasibility connecting a patch [40].…”

Pressures and Threats to Nature Related to Human Activities in European Urban and Suburban Forests

“…Urban development to ensure comfortable access to environmental recreation sites preserved for this purpose [69] is now not a standard solution, although there are many countries that protect forests (or even afforest open habitats) in urban and suburban areas ( [1], for example, in Belgium [70,71], Denmark [72,73], Sweden [72,74], the United Kingdom [75], Serbia [50], or in Finland [72], Iceland [72], and Norway [72]).…”

“…Similarly to the case of plants, habitat devastation is related to deforestation [63,170] and fragmentation [16,32,136] but also to urbanization close to/in the forest, the lack of foraging sites, and isolation, which is troublesome both for the movement and dispersal of individuals [16,32]. This is why wildlife corridors are necessary, especially in urban and suburban areas [3,50,56,61,179]. On the European Union scale, the protection of ecological corridors is planned in the Natura 2000 network; however, from the point of view of the needs of species associated with urban and suburban forests, this may be insufficient.…”

The Improvement of the Comfort of Public Spaces as a Local Initiative in Coping with Climate Change

“…The concept of green infrastructure can be broadly defined as a strategically planned network of natural and semi-natural elements with other environmental features, which is designed and managed to deliver a wide range of ecosystem services [31]. In conditions of climate change, the concept of green infrastructure may be considered the most appropriate for flexible planning in urban landscapes [34]. Urban vegetation can affect the microclimate on the level of particular public spaces (parks, squares, streets or urban pockets) or the climate of the broader area such as the city district, if it is understood as an element of the green infrastructure system.…”