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Green Infrastructure & Landscape Principles
The Australian Landscape Principles provide a strategic decision-making framework for green infrastructure planning, design and management within our cities and settlements.
They outline how integrated approaches for managing landscape value within the built environment can leverage existing resources and enhance design responses to broader challenges of urban sustainability and climate change adaptation.
About Green Infrastructure
The term ‘green infrastructure’ describes the network of natural landscape assets which underpin the economic, socio-cultural and environmental functionality of our cities and towns – i.e. the green spaces and water systems which intersperse, connect and provide vital life support for humans and other species within our urban environments.
Individual components of this environmental network are sometimes referred to as ‘green infrastructure assets’, and these occur across a range of landscape scales – from residential gardens to local parks & housing estates, streetscapes & highway verges, services & communications corridors, waterways & regional recreation areas etc.
The Value of Green Infrastructure
Human settlements are complex, evolving social-ecological systems which are dependent on the health of their associated natural environments for ongoing sustainability.
Our cities and towns are currently the focus of intensive efforts to reduce resource use and maximize efficiency, in response to escalating social, environmental and economic pressures from global development, urbanization, population growth and climate change.
How green infrastructure assets are managed, at both local and regional scales, can significantly influence the effectiveness of our responses to such challenges.
Green infrastructure is fundamentally different from other aspects of built infrastructure, in that it has the unique, inherent capacity to enhance and regenerate natural resources, rather than simply minimize the damage to environmental systems.
When existing landscape assets are strategically connected and managed in an integrated manner within and beyond settlement boundaries, this regenerative capacity increases exponentially.
The Challenge
There is an urgent need to develop new design and management solutions for our built environments which increase their capacity to adapt and respond to change, including strategies which aim to proactively leverage landscape performance.
Green infrastructure strategies provide a framework for more holistic planning, design and monitoring of the complex interactions between the (non-regenerative) built form and the environment within which it is situated – in order to enhance the performance of both, and to enable human settlements to function as integral components of larger landscape processes affecting energy, water, carbon and biodiversity.
Addressing the Landscape Principles
1. value our landscape
Articulate the central function of landscape within the urban ecosystem, and develop collaborative policy and planning strategies for valuing, measuring and monitoring urban landscape performance within the context of an integrated “green infrastructure” framework.
2. protect, enhance, regenerate
Green infrastructure planning and management approaches should incorporate innovative, measurable strategies to:
Protect & reconnect existing environmental features and ecosystem processes.
Enhance existing natural resources in a creative, sustainable manner.
Regenerate lost or damaged ecosystem services.
3. design with respect
Green infrastructure within the urban environment should:
Be planned and managed with regard to existing community values and expectations,
Be measurably responsive to existing environmental, socio-cultural and economic conditions,
Demonstrate respect for local, regional and global context.
4. design for the future
Green infrastructure policy, design and management approaches should adopt decision-making processes which increase resilience within our built environments.
Improving the capacity of the urban fabric to adapt and respond to the possibility of future change enhances environmental, socio-cultural and economic outcomes for future generations.
5. embrace responsive design
Green infrastructure policy, design and management approaches should be consistently innovative, adaptable and responsive, continuously re-evaluating assumptions and values and adjusting to demographic and environmental change.
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