From the ground up: Using structured community engagement to identify objectives for urban green infrastructure planning

Municipal governments are increasingly looking to green infrastructure to address climate-related flooding and water quality issues, and as a cost-effective way to augment aging 'grey' stormwater infrastructure. There is also a great deal of interest in more fully involving citizens in efforts to increase the amount of green infrastructure in cities. Despite this acknowledgement of the importance of public engagement, however, many green infrastructure initiatives still adhere to a top-down and expert-driven process of site selection and design. This mismatch between process and engagement ideals can lead to suboptimal outcomes in terms of sustaining these projects over the long term, the achievement of multifunctional and inclusive spaces, and missed opportunities to increase civic capacity to participate in and drive urban planning initiatives. Further, the turn to green infrastructure has been criticized for not including a diversity voices in planning, design and implementation, with green gentrification occurring as a result. Thus, the objectives of this research were to, in collaboration with communities, (i) use structured elicitation to establish social and ecological priorities (in the form of key ecosystem services and disservices) to inform a community-based GI design and planning process, and (ii) use this collaboration to inform the development of the Land.Info DSS that creates realistic representations of site scale landscape change and incorporates community identified priorities as real-time feedback. Community members reported that including their design objectives in the Land.Info design tool helped to guide their green infrastructure designs and that they modified their designs in response to the feedback provided within the interface. Additional desired outcomes of this research were to provide a vehicle for improved public engagement and learning opportunities for GI planning, design and implementation, and to develop a reliable and scalable method for incorporating community values and needs into these processes. Providing residents with meaningful opportunities for input and collaboration in urban landscape planning and design aligns with the growing interest in democratizing the design, management, and governance of public spaces.