Green Infrastructure: concepts, perceptions and its use in planning

Green infrastructure offers a contemporary approach to the conceptualisation and management of landscape resources and has developed rapidly in the UK, Europe and North America. As a result it has been proposed as meeting a number of the ecological, economic and social challenges of spatial planning. The attention given to the growth of green infrastructure has been supported by the development of a number of overarching principles–principles that provide green infrastructure research with a multi-layered understanding of the changing nature of landscape resources. The themes developed identify a number of conceptual and implementation principles for green infrastructure. The roles of integrated planning policy, strategic thinking and multi-functionality are discussed to highlight the different forms that green infrastructure research can take. Based on these discussions, this work proposes that a green infrastructure approach to planning can be used to meet the complex challenges of current landscape planning. With continued development of green infrastructure, some of the most pressing issues in planning, such as climate change or sustainable development, can be addressed.