Urban Sustainability and River Restoration: Green and Blue Infrastructure

Urban Sustainability and River Restoration: Green and Blue Infrastructure considers the integration of green and blue infrastructure in cities as a strategy useful for acting on causes and effects of environmental and ecological issues. River restoration projects are unique opportunities for sustainable development and smart growth of communities, providing multiple environmental, economic, and social benefits. This book analyzes initiatives and actions carried out and developed to improve environmental conditions in cities and better understand the environmental impact of (and in) dense urban areas in the United States and in Europe. Green and blue infrastructure (GBI) can play a crucial role to reduce environmental issues in cities. GBI thus contributes to the enhancement of human health, residents’ quality of life and sustainable development. This topic is usually considered within the boundaries of single disciplines. In this book, instead, it is investigated with a holistic attitude to integrate several disciplinary contributions and design and management approaches. This is the result of the collaboration between two authors with different expertise and backgrounds, concerning environmental sustainability, urban ecology, urban landscape and urban design. This approach provides an analytical outline, which can be useful for urban planners, architects and engineers, nonprofit and community associations, legislators and policy makers alike. Policies and regulations regarding environmental sustainability represent a key focus of the book, along with technical implementation aspects. The first part of this book presents an overview of the main ecological and environmental problems affecting urban areas due to a combination of anthropic activities and climate change effects. It hence outlines the related mitigation and adaptation strategies based on GBI implementation and river restoration. The second part analyses the techniques to integrate these mitigation and adaptation strategies in the urban context. The third part of the book defines top-down and bottom-up policies, developed in the United States and in Europe. Rivers and streams are critical to almost any green and blue infrastructure system and can provide important recreational spaces in cities and access to the water. The discussion of complex technical and political processes focused on the improvement of urban sustainability explains the importance of river renaturation and GBI not only for the future of cities, but also for the capacity to generate broad renovation initiatives, community involvement and a new policy agenda. This book includes the analysis of six river restoration case studies developed in Europe and in the United States, which depict the successful integration of green and blue infrastructure in urban contexts, highlighting the positive outcomes of different approaches. Renovation processes, in fact, can be based on community initiatives and joint efforts of local community organizations and public bodies (e.g. Bronx River in NYC and LA River in Los Angeles). Conversely, top-down policies can also create praiseworthy renovation projects devising completely new urban landscapes (e.g. Madrid Rìo in Spain and Paillon River in France). These case studies, moreover, are of particular interest as they show the success of policies and governance at different scales – federal, national, administrative and local – to restore neglected places and trigger brownfield regeneration (e.g. Thames River in England and Emscher River in Germany).