green is the new grey

Chris Bean talks about 'Green Infrastructure'.........

I guess not everyone reading this has heard of Green Infrastructure (GI) Planning. If not, then you soon will. At the recent ParkCity green infrastructure conference, CABE and Natural England brought together an international audience of professionals - most of whose interests lie outside the established green sector - to discuss the latest thinking and share solutions

CABE's Grey to Green campaign is now calling for a switch in public spending from grey projects, like road building and heavy engineering projects, to green schemes like street trees, parks, green roofs and waterways.

But why bother? In general terms, improving green infrastructure within urban areas is a way of getting more out our green spaces, making them hugely efficient and valuable assets and bringing many benefits to residents. We can see the wider benefits in a number of forms:

Better quality of life:

• Reducing crime (and the perception of crime) through natural surveillance in well-used public spaces;
• Encouraging community integration through using green spaces for social events; 
• Attracting businesses by ensuring pleasant environmental surroundings; 
• Areas of multiple deprivation often contain the most neglected and under-used areas of public space (the rehabilitation of a park in a deprived area can act as a catalyst to rehabilitate the entire community).

Healthier residents:

• Reducing the urban heat island effect through evaporative cooling, shading and providing corridors for cooler air to flow into urban areas as well as filtering polluted air; 
• Providing safe, easily accessible green routes for walking and cycling; 
• Reducing physical and mental health problems through physical activity and enjoyment of open space and nature.

Stronger local economy:

• Creating environmentally attractive surroundings encourage businesses to relocate to a place.

Protection from climate change:

• Managing surface water runoff to prevent flooding
• Storing tidal flood water to reduce the risk of tidal flooding in estuaries
• Storing river flood water to reduce the risk of fluvial flooding e.g. through the restoration of floodplains
• Creating cooler microclimates and therefore reducing the need to cool buildings
• Providing shelter and protection in extreme weather providing habitats, corridors and a more permeable landscape to help wildlife adapt to climate change.

Mitigating climate change:

• Reducing travel through provision of local recreation opportunities;
• Providing sustainable transport corridors to reduce carbon emissions from vehicles; 
• Increasing local food production to reduce food miles; 
• Improving carbon storage and sequestration.

The East London Green Grid is one example that has been particularly successful in influencing wider planning and design strategies and we are also working with a number of Local Authorities to develop green infrastructure studies. Of course, we are all too aware that in many areas where the urban form is largely established it is more difficult to create significant new green spaces. That makes existing green infrastructure and creative greening approaches particularly important. Street trees, the greening of selected streets, building roofs and facades, creating linkages to nearby green spaces, and the de-culverting of water courses all provide opportunities.

GI planning is starting to become an essential element in sustainable planning, an organising framework for integrating physical resources and natural systems with ecological, geological and historical assets. A good GI strategy should include, and crucially prioritise, all those drivers of GI asset protection, enhancement and creation, informed by PPG17, LCA etc. These inputs should be commissioned together and should certainly be analysed together.

A vision for GI in a regeneration context will likely require a different strategy to one in a growth point. One will see GI as part of promoting development; the other may see addressing deficits in growth locations as more important. The location, type, financing, delivery and measureable outcomes of GI in each case could look very different.

Of course, although there is evidence that GI is helping to shape the spatial plan in the first place, only time will tell if the Core Strategy/Area Action Plans will take up the challenge and set out what relative contribution GI will make to its vision/objectives.

Chris Bean (chris.bean@capita.co.uk) is Associate Director Planning and Urban Design at Capita Symonds

Read more Talking Point articles