In 1950, less than 30 percent of the world's population lived in cities. This number grew to 47 percent in the year 2000 (2.8 billion people), and it is expected to grow to 60 percent by the year 2025. The functional infrastructure services needed to accommodate this growth is staggering. If nothing is done, the potential effect on natural ecosystems could be catastrophic, both locally and globally. To avoid this will require the expertise of multiple disciplines (engineering, ecology, landscape architecture and urban planning) and new ways of thinking about urban infrastructure. The Research Workshop, Greening of Cities, will bring together experts from multiple fields, across the globe. They will identify and prioritize the range of issues that need to be addressed and assess the sufficiency of existing knowledge needed to find solutions. They will identify green technologies, such as green roofs, green walls, constructed wetlands, greenways, green streets and others that hold promise for solving these problems. Workshop attendees will identify ways of quantifying the potential functionality of Green Infrastructure, such as cleaning water, climate modification and filtering air, as well as the multiple values that come from these services, including improving human health, reducing energy consumption, moving people and increasing sustainable economic development. The attendees will also identify important intangible values that come from green urban infrastructure, such as increased wildlife diversity, visual quality and other contributors to quality of urban life. The implications of these issues will be examined at both a local and global scale. In order to understand the potential for incorporating Green Infrastructure into cities, workshop participants will examine selected case examples from around the world. The result of the workshop will be a set of research needs and strategies that will include collaborative research efforts that will provide the knowledge needed to better understand how green infrastructure can benefit the built environment, both quantitatively and qualitatively, and its communities.
Cities provide important social and economic opportunities for people, which is why cities around the world are growing at a phenomenal rate. With such growth, we need to ensure that cities are healthy places to live, providing clean water, transportation and energy through urban infrastructure while ensuring people have clean air and healthy places to live and work. In order to achieve affordable, sustainable infrastructure, scientists and engineers are looking at green technologies and regenerative systems, such as green roofs, green walls, constructed wetlands and greenways. For these new, green technologies to be adopted by urban planners and others who build cities, experts must be able to demonstrate the value of these new technologies and how they can be implemented, both through research as well as practical experience. The purpose of this workshop is to gather experts from different fields around the world to examine the problems cities face, to identify potential green infrastructure solutions and to identify the research needed to demonstrate their value.
Outcomes Sustainability is well recognized as a major challenge for society in this century. Population growth, urbanization, energy costs, resource and monetary constraints, climate change, aging infrastructure, social inequality and the continued loss of ecosystem benefits all pose acute risks to contemporary society. There is currently limited understanding of the complex and interrelated risks that such trends pose on the large scale infrastructure systems, for example roads, sewers, storm drains, greenways, buildings and etcetera, in cities, which as of 2009 housed more than half of the world’s population. New approaches to infrastructure design and ecological restoration are needed, as well as research into their performance, if the urban environmental quality of life is to improve amidst such formidable set of constraints. One promising approach is "Green Infrastructure." Green Infrastructure is an umbrella term used to refer to natural and engineered ecological systems that integrate with the built environment to provide the widest possible range of ecological, community and infrastructure benefits. Today, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency defines "Green Infrastructure" as "an approach that communities can choose to maintain healthy waters, provide multiple environmental benefits and support sustainable communities." While the original concept for green infrastructure was to manage stormwater, the benefits of incorporating green infrastructure into urban settings are potentially much broader, influencing temperature, wind, air pollution, water and wastewater management, light/shade, ambiance, food production, carbon sequestration, sea level rise, storm surge, biodiversity, food production, mental well-being and community cohesion. Efforts to implement Green Infrastructure are in different stages of maturity around the world. While much of the discussion of Green Infrastructure is based primarily on the U.S. experience, there are many examples of Green Infrastructure happening around the world with different challenges, contextual constraints and potential benefits. The major goal of this project was to host an international research workshop to assess the extent to which Green Infrastructure is fundamentally changing how urban development is evolving. The two and a half day, international, research workshop was held in Auckland, NZ to identify the role, importance and research needs for Green Infrastructure in cities around the world. Invited participants represented a number of countries, disciplinary backgrounds and sectors. A participatory approach was used to share the different ideas of these practitioners, regarding the ability of Green Infrastructure to address the various needs of contemporary cities. The activities of the workshop resulted in the following: Identification of ecological benefits of Green Infrastructure in urban areas from around the world. Determination of the relative importance of different Green Infrastructure research topics at a global scale in terms of those that are well studied and well known, uncertain and under investigation, and unstudied and unknown. Identification ways to measure Green Infrastructure benefits and research strategies to do so. Identification the role of research in advancing Green Infrastructure, the recognition of Green Infrastructure multiple benefits and the development of Green Infrastructure policies. Identification of the process by which Green Infrastructure and the recognition of its multiple benefits evolves in cities. The products produced by this project include: Development of a Greening of Cities website that is accessible to the public (www.greeningofcities.org/). Development of a Facebook web site on Green Urban Infrastructure (www.facebook.com/greenurbaninfrastructure). Collection of Green Infrastructure case studies (see case studies on workshop website www.greeningofcities.org/). Journal article describing workshop results (see "products" section of this final report.
