Urban green space as a countermeasure to increasing urban risk and the UGS-3CC resilience framework

Abstract

Urban green space is an asset to a city. It facilitates social interactions, health and wellbeing, recreation and alternate livelihoods. If created, nurtured and enhanced, urban green space can extend the resilience and security of energy, health, water, food, and biodiversity systems. Urban green spaces are an alternative or complementary alternative to engineered infrastructure to ameliorate quality of life and can attenuate urban heat island (UHI) impact and improve urban water management significantly. Performance-based monitoring can evaluate the efficiency of urban green spaces as a measure against heat and water stress. Increasing vulnerability exposes a large number of urban populations and assets to risks. Urban green spaces, when networked with other blue-green spaces, show improved efficiency as an urban risk resiliency (URR) measure. Despite its potential as a URR tool, the deployment of urban green spaces is quite limited, especially in developing countries. Challenges include a lack of integrated strategies, green-engineering design and instrumented monitoring, management best practices and incentives to change. This article reviews urban green space types and their resilience capacity and proposes the UGS-3CC framework, which is an urban climate resiliency model based on blue-green networking. The framework responds to the design, implementation and management challenges of urban green spaces by using a contextual concept, core competency and contribution calculation. © 2018 Elsevier Ltd