Balancing formal and informal greenspaces in Urban Nature Plans
University of East London (UEL) researchers had the pleasure of attending the recent UNP+ project Urban Nature Exchange (UNE) in Belgrade, Serbia. UNEs are project workshops designed to promote knowledge exchange between cities developing Urban Nature Plans. The workshops are delivered in one of the UNP+ project cities and are planned across two or three days to include a blend of thematic activities and discussions linked to certain UNP steps. They also include site visits within the city to learn about city context and challenges, and to see examples of how urban nature is being implemented and stewarded locally.
For this UNE, practitioners from the cities of Belgrade, Burgas, Mannheim, Paris, and Barcelona were invited to explore and share their experience of aspects of UNP development including how to embed resilience, reflexive monitoring, communication, and citizen science approaches into Urban Nature Planning. Exchanges were very productive with experiences shared, explored, and discussed, and key learnings from these exchanges captured, distilled, and disseminated beyond the project through the UNP+ Capacity-Building Programme.
This was not the only critical learning that happened during the UNE though: the site visits that complemented the more formal workshops were also a critical part of the knowledge exchange. They provided insight into the spatial planning context of the City of Belgrade and an opportunity to understand how urban nature planning is permeating into the development of the city. This was a valuable experience for the attendees, but particularly so for the UEL researchers who have a key role on the project building knowledge and capacity in cities on nature-based solutions design, and monitoring the impacts of a UNP.
Whilst there were clearly innovative projects occurring in Belgrade, including a fabulous pollinator garden in the middle of the city’s botanical gardens (providing habitat for pollinators and education for visitors), the researchers saw first-hand that many of the issues that they have spent years addressing in their own neighbourhood in East London are still being experienced elsewhere. Namely, how to balance the needs of nature and the needs of people through innovative urban greenspace design.
In addition to an abundance of formal greenspaces in central Belgrade, there were also many amazing examples of informal greenspaces that were irregularly managed (2 or 3 cuts per year), or indeed not managed at all. Many of these areas were clearly providing important habitat critical for supporting the diverse wildlife found across the city, including their rich pollinator populations. However, similarly to many other localities, the biodiversity value of informal, under used, and derelict sites, appeared to be somewhat overlooked in Belgrade planning processes. We saw examples of habitats of high biodiversity value in Belgrade being replaced by formal green infrastructure landscaping. The new habitats, whilst performing for some aspects of urban greenspace design (e.g. creating attractive amenity spaces for walking and social interaction) would have limited functionality, particularly for wildlife, due to a lack of consideration of the needs of local biodiversity in their design, or what is implemented following design. Indeed, the creation of such spaces would most likely replace and extirpate the rich biodiversity the city supports, rather than enhancing it.
This pattern reflects a key challenge in developing and monitoring Urban Nature Plans: whilst much of the redevelopment of informal spaces in urban areas would be highly likely to meet the key nature restoration monitoring targets of no net loss of greenspace & tree canopy cover, it would also likely have a devastating impact on the diverse wildlife that was associated with these informal wild spaces. This pattern of biotic homogenisation is being observed across many cities in Europe and beyond. It is a key challenge that needs to be considered and integrated when developing a UNP, to ensure that UNPs truly enhance and increase biodiversity in cities. It is also a key driver for why more complex indicators (e.g. species richness/diversity, proportion of natural/protected areas, and land use coverage) are needed to underpin and evaluate the impacts of a UNP on biodiversity and ecosystem service provision in a city, in addition to NRR indicators.
Author: Stuart Connop is a professor in sustainability whose research specialises in the design, delivery, and monitoring of nature-based solutions with a particular focus on multifunctional benefits for people and nature. He is a Work Package Leader in the UNP+ project supporting cities in developing approaches to UNP monitoring and evaluation. He has also worked on Horizon funded projects: Connecting Nature and TURAS.
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