Grönstrukturens synliggörande; en förutsättning för integration av kunskaper om grönstrukturen i stadsplaneringen

Report, 2004

This is the final report from the project ”Green Structure in urban design and planning” within the research programme ”Sustainable urban development and Urban Structures” (SUUS). The green structure is vital to a sustainable urban development. It constitutes a large part of the urban landscape and it plays important roles in relation to the cultural, social and technical urban structures. Further, the urban dwellers are engaged in the outdoor environment in a concrete and emotional way, which can be seen a potential for engagement supporting local participation in the planning processes. Finally, urban greenery constitutes an important link between urban dwellers and the nature, a link, which is often very vague, as our fundamental need for the ecosystem has become abstract and almost invisible to us. Thus, it is very relevant to state that urban development and planning should be characterized by competent strategies in order to safeguard the green resources. However, the lack of such strategies is an important point of departure for this project. The searching for ways to understand and methods to integrate green structure-knowledge into urban planning aiming at sustainable urban development is thus a main objective here. The research problem is the lack of methods to express and maintain the qualitative significance of green structure in relation to urban design and planning. Following this, the main focus for this project is the critical discussion of challenges and possibilities of the green structure planning, reflecting the issue’s complexity and the need to find localized and situation-adapted strategies. Thus, the research objectives are: – How does contemporary green planning work? – In what ways can knowledge about the multifunctional potential of green structure be visualised and useful in local situations? – In what ways can geographical information systems (GIS) be used to create efficient tools supporting communication about this multifunctional potential? The main conclusion is that the lack of strategies for the safeguard and maintaining of green resources is related to the inability of physical planning to visualize and make use of green qualities at different planning levels and in different contexts. Visualisation is thus a key to the realisation of such strategies. This project has dealt with five aspects of the visualisation and utilization of green qualities, here formulated as challenges to urban design and planning: (1) to open up for new levels in physical planning, (2) to see the green structure as a whole, no matter the ownership, (3) to avoid getting caught in sector division but to connect different urban planning issues in planning across sectors, (4) to take care of experience-based knowledge from different actors, and (5) to pay attention to the cultural aspects affecting people’s use of the green structure. Keywords: green structure, sustainable urban development, urban design and planning, green structure planning.