Planning Cities with Nature: Theories, Strategies and Methods

This book explores novel theories, strategies and methods for re-naturing cities. It enables readers to learn from best practice and advances the current theoretical and empirical understanding in the field. The book also offers valuable insights into how planners and policymakers can apply this knowledge to their own cities and regions, exploring top-down, bottom-up and mixed mechanisms for the systemic re-naturing of planned and existing cities. 

There is considerable interest in ‘naturalising’ cities, since it can help address multiple global societal challenges and generate various benefits, such as the enhancement of health and well-being, sustainable urbanisation, ecosystems and their services, and resilience to climate change. This can also translate into tangible economic benefits in terms of preventing health hazards, positively affecting health-related expenditure, new job opportunities (i.e. urban farming) and the regeneration of urban areas.

There is, thus, a compelling case to investigate integrative approaches to urban and natural systems that can help cities address the social, economic and environmental needs of a growing population. How can we plan with nature? What are the models and approaches that can be used to develop more sustainable cities that provide high-quality urban green spaces?

Dr. Fabiano Lemes de Oliveira is a Reader in Urbanism and Architecture at the University of Portsmouth, UK. He is the Research Leader at Portsmouth School of Architecture and the coordinator of the Masters in Sustainable Cities. His research expertise is in planning models aimed at balancing urbanisation with nature, in particular related to the green wedge idea; green and blue infrastructure; sustainable and resilient planning models and planning history and theory. He was the coordinator of the British Council/ FAPEG Newton Fund 'Re-Naturing Cities' project and is the author of the book Green Wedge Urbanism: History, Theory and Contemporary Practice (Bloomsbury, 2017).

Dr. Ian Mell is a Senior Lecturer at the School of Environment, Education and Development, University of Manchester, UK. He is a Landscape Planner with a specialism in Green Infrastructure policy, planning and development. He has worked in academia, the environment sector and local government, and has extensiveexperience of researching landscape issues in the UK, EU and more widely in the USA, India and China. He is the author of Global Green Infrastructure (Mell, 2016, Routledge) and Green Belt: Part, Present, Future? (Sturzaker & Mell, 2017, Routledge).