Green infrastructure planning framework

Abstract

The concept of GI, multi-stakeholder participation and resilient cities has emerged as a new dimension of sustainable urban development for green growth - leading to the strengthening of the resilience of the urban eco-system. Since Pakistan is undoubtedly at high risk to climate change and its impacts, especially flooding, makes the region vulnerable to in-daunting climatic catastrophes, the northwestern areas of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) province were no exception, gives evidence of the high relevance of the topic. Furthermore, the outdated and unbalanced Urban Landscape and Urban Greening (UL-UG) planning policies show the need to create a framework of synergies between the theoretical and practical implementation of nature-based GI planning practices (under multi-stakeholder participation) at all administrative levels. This empirical study has provided a foundation for deeper investigation into the complex dynamics of linking GI planning–urban resilience–multi-stakeholder participatory planning (MSPP) concepts (nexus) to develop a sustainable UGI framework. This framework/model is developed under MSPP that recommends UGI indicators, grounded upon the Triple Bottom Line " (TBL)" of sustainability and their spatial functional linkages with the innovative multi-functional GS, tailored to the native built environment. Which are to be implemented in the UL-UG design guidelines of Pakistan as a whole, and, more specifically, the KP province. Such a UGI model bolsters MSPP, taking (into account) the input of all native multi-stakeholders (top-down planning experts and bottom-up household community members) and enables the building of safer, greener and climate-resilient regions (fortified to withstand CC) in the KP region and across the country. The work is deemed as the first pioneering step that embeds (the GI) study (under the MSPP approach) in its relevant local context of the 'Peshawar', 'Mardan', and 'Charsadda' districts of the KP region. Since no such empirical study has been conducted on such a subject and the integration of a bidirectional sustainable development pathway in the context of a non-collaborative planning environment as prevails in countries like Pakistan. This remains true even for the northwestern parts of the KP region. This reality makes this study novel.