The multifaceted geographies of green infrastructure policy and planning: socio-environmental dreams, nightmares, and amnesia

Abstract

Of what 'green infrastructure' do we dream?Infrastructure lies at the heart of many disputes within environmental policy and planning. Take for example recent proposals for massive federal investments in infrastructure in the United States. These investments promise climate resilience, secure jobs, and large improvements in environmental quality occurring alongside a new era of public lands policy. Despite these lofty goals, fierce debate rages over the relationship between infrastructure spending, social wellbeing, and economic performance. Within these debates, some have argued for a deeper inclusion of 'green infrastructure' (GI), as a key component of sustainability transitions. And yet, debate continues over what GI is and how it should be implemented.Existing scholarship makes clear that GI means different things to different individuals and institutions. Deeply contested, GI manifests via varying conceptual orientations: through a water/stormwater management approach, an urban ecology/ecosystem services approach, a landscape conservation/greenspace planning approach, and integrative approaches across these overlapping orientations (Matsler et al., 2021;Szulczewska et al., 2017). Even within each of these conceptual orientations, significant differences exist in the scope and interpretation of what constitutes GI (Wright, 2011). These are not simply epistemological issues related to disciplinary silos; rather they stem from incompatible ontologies over what type of work should be expected from ecosystems, and its close corollary, the nature of the relationship between humans and landscapes (Gabriel, 2014;Gandy, 2002;Wachsmuth, 2012). Like many issues facing sustainability policy, these ontological concerns do work beyond the abstract, revealing the radically different and often alienated experiences of humans with each other and their resident ecosystems (Grabowski et al., 2019).Ontological instability adds considerable confusion to the implementation and practice of GI. The GI concept was originally popularized as a way to connect various ecological habitat typessuch as street trees, forest patches, parks, restored streams, and floodplainsin a cohesive planning framework to provide multiple benefits (Benedict & McMahon, 2001). In practice however, GI is more often implemented to address specific and singular purposes: for example, GI is built as an engineering solution for stormwater (Fletcher et al., 2015) or flood (Thorne et al., 2018) management, or entangled with political solutions to 'undesirable' land uses as in the case of clearing slums (Millington, 2018) and redevelopment of vacant properties (Schilling & Logan, 2008). In each of these cases, significant conflict exists over what counts as 'green infrastructure' to meet the socially defined goals driving urban and infrastructure redevelopment.In addition to different conceptualizations of what biophysical elements are considered 'part of' GI, GI is also socially and politically mutable. This instability presents itself as a contradiction of meani...

How reliable – and (net) beneficial – is the green in green infrastructure

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Figure 1. The eco-techno spectrum of green infrastructure organizes facilities by the proportion of the facility that consists of living, biological components vs human-made, technological components. From Matsler et al (2021).

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“…The use of GI has stimulated a great flowering of creative design and strategies, but a lack of guidelines and standards creates variation in implementation and challenges for evaluation. This variation underlies the second challenge, that is, the need for regionally specific codes and standards (Matsler, Grabowski, and Elder 2021). Guidelines and standards for dry cities in Latin America (e.g., Mexico City) need to be different than those that apply in wet temperate cities (e.g., Baltimore).…”

Significance of the Participatory Budget in Supporting Green Infrastructure

“…The diverse aspects of green infrastructure, both regarding its origins and contemporary conceptual and application expectations, are covered more extensively by Matsler and co-authors (Matsler et al, 2021a), and Koc et al (2017). A detailed overview of the publications on green infrastructure with an attempt to classify and categorise them (assigning them to specific research areas) is presented by Matsler, Meerow, Mell, and Pavao-Zuckerman (Matsler et al, 2021).…”

Dreams and Parables of Sustainable Mobilities

“…As Marissa Matsler and her colleagues aptly put it, one person's dream is another's nightmare, and dreams-come-true for some can have adverse effects on others. 10 This section therefore attends to three points of discussion on how and why dreams enrich work on sustainable mobility. Firstly, dreams as a form of intimate ontology subvert topdown discourses of imagined mobility users and return agency to the imaginations of the people themselves.…”