More than 100 acres of new green surfaces in Ljubljana

Degraded, overlooked and unused areas of the city of Ljubljana are being converted into new green surfaces. This contributes to mitigating climate change and enhances the quality of life of citizens and visitors alike.

Green infrastructure (GI) should not be understood as something new. The concept of GI, which includes the concept that nature is essential for improving people’s quality of life and well-being in cities, can be traced back to the first half of the 19th century. From that time, different planning approaches, embedded in societal needs, started to emerge, such as green belts, public parks, garden cities, regional green systems and greenways. It is important to build on experiences gained and adapt them to meet new needs and circumstances.

In the early 1990s, ‘green system planning’ started in Slovenia, and it has been part of municipal spatial planning since then. The Ljubljana green system, for example, has been developed to provide an interconnected system of natural elements that stretch into the city and scattered green areas, managing the ecological, cultural and morphological role of green areas in the urban tissue.

The role of green systems in Slovenia

Green systems are contingent on spatial circumstances. They encompass different types of green areas such as parks, trees, playgrounds, urban forests, water and green spaces along waterways, urban gardening areas and formerly degraded areas turned into various types of green areas. This illustrates, in my opinion, that green system planning and GI planning have similar if not the same purposes and benefits.Nevertheless, the GI initiative gave new impetus to the argument that high-quality and well-functioning natural systems translate into high-quality and well-supported societal development. This is particularly important in cities, where there is more demand for social and cultural functions: green systems can reduce heat island effects, contribute to stormwater management and support soft mobility, all of which can make cities more attractive and liveable? I believe that the amelioration of urban green areas improves the attractiveness of cities and counteracts, to at least some degree, suburbanisation, which requires new land take and soil sealing.

"SEA is mainly used separately from planning, which means that it cannot effetively contribute to the improvement of planning"

Green infrastructure in spatial and urban planning

The EU strategy on green infrastructure highlights that GI should be ‘a strategically planned network’. It should be embedded in spatial planning and management. As such, it could give appropriate strategic orientation, which results from reconciling different needs, opportunities and restrictions, and taking into account multiple interests at different levels.

However, when adapting the GI concept to spatial and urban planning, we are confronted with many policy, methodological and technical questions. To name just a few of them: What does GI mean to compact cities? How do we cope with zero net land take in GI planning? Is GI a type of land use or not? As rightly highlighted by the GRETA (Green Infrastructure:Enhancing Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services for Territorial Development) project, ‘GI development requires space’, which may, at the same time, ‘increase land-use competition’.

There are two other aspects of the GI concept, namely multifunctionality and connectivity. Experts claim that GI provides multifunctionality per se because ecosystems in principle provide multiple benefits through ecosystem services.

But, in practice, multifunctionality should be achieved in a concrete spatial and urban setting.

As described in the GRETA project, ecosystem services can provide support for multiple policies, especially when the former are in synergy. But ecosystem services can also contradict one another, affecting each other negatively. That is why a place-based or ‘functional’ approach, as it is called in the GRETA project, is crucial, because it is the only approach that addresses different opportunities and needs in different spatial contexts.

However, this also gives rise to concerns about the GRETA recommendation to use strategic environmental assessment (SEA) to include GI in spatial development plans. SEA is mainly used separately from planning, which means that it cannot effetively contribute to the improvement of planning. In the SEA process, requirements from environmental, health, water, nature and culture conservation policies are addressed separately; they are not interrelated and not adapted to the level of a spatial plan.

The case of Slovenia

In Slovenia, we are currently preparing a long-term spatial development strategy, which includes GI as an integrated element of spatial development together with polycentric urban development, wider urban areas and rural areas. One of the strategy’s objectives is to improve the quality of life in urban and rural areas. Green systems or GI at regional and local levels play an important role in this endeavour.

GI is connected to similar areas in a wider space to enable ecological connectivity among naturally preserved areas of the Alps and Dinaric Mountains, cross-border rivers and the sea. Thus, it also contributes to the implementation of the Alpine Green Infrastructure Declaration, ‘Joining forces for nature, people and economy’, adopted in 2018 within the framework of the EU strategy for the Alpine region (EUSALP).

In addition to supporting ecological functions, GI increases climate change resilience at the national level. At regional and local levels, GI can be implemented as regional green systems within regional spatial plans and green systems of settlements within local spatial planning documents. Providing appropriate connections among them will enable the development of genuine GI, supporting sustainable societal development.

The implementation of GI at the regional level is being tested as part of the Interreg project PERFECT – Planning for Environment and Resource Efficiency in European Cities and Towns (1), which aims to develop a regional GI strategy for the Ljubljana urban area. The strategy will provide a basis for a regional spatial plan and other plans and future investments in this field. One of the outputs expected from the PERFECT project is more awareness and an improved understanding of GI among local decision-makers, which will be crucial for implementing the GI concept in the future.