Urban Wetlands as Resilient Landscape Infrastructure—The Case of Llanquihue Green Infrastructure Plan, Chile
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Date
2024
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Springer
Abstract
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024.The urban green infrastructure planning approach provides an innovative conceptual and operational framework to face the current challenges of conservation and rehabilitation of urban wetlands in the context of disturbances and vulnerabilities caused by urban expansion processes, climate change and disasters. In this sense, landscape units and their components can be conceived as a potential structuring network for the city and the territory, contributing to an integrated planning of natural and anthropic systems at both spatial and functional levels, considering the relationship of their ecologies with urban infrastructure systems through nature-based solutions. The Llanquihue Green Infrastructure Plan—an applied research initiative presented in this chapter—addresses this conceptual framework to configure a landscape project based on the spatial and functional articulation of existing urban wetlands, transforming them into key elements of an infrastructure system designed to provide social benefits and ecosystem services to the city and its communities. Instead of “constructing” green spaces, with the high costs involved, the plan proposes the concept of “landscape activation” through the configuration of specific and delimited components designed to enable, equip and provide access to these areas, thereby promoting the efficiency of the public investment. The performance of these hybrid natural systems—related to the synergistic combination of ecological and anthropic components—contributes to the provision of socio-ecological functions and services related to risk reduction and adaptive capacity to climate change. At the same time, in the absence of public and green spaces, especially in vulnerable environments, it can contribute to the development of memorable places for urban living through the integration of ecologies, social programmes and multi-purpose infrastructures. From a strategic approach, this initiative is proposed as a complementary and guiding platform to feed the current urban planning instruments, as well as to generate alternative mechanisms and tools for the integrated management of landscape and public spaces, becoming a potential model to be applied in other cases of regional cities also characterised by problems related to the recovery and enhancement of urban ecosystems.
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Keywords
Green infrastructure, Landscape activation, Nature-based solutions, Urban resilience, Urban wetlands