Urbag

This research aims to find out how urban green infrastructures can be most efficient in contributing to urban sustainability by evaluating which combinations of urban, peri-urban agriculture and green spaces result in the best performance in terms of local and global environmental impact. For this purpose, the project will develop novel and comprehensive analysis that will integrate the life cycle impacts of the resources required for green infrastructures with the understanding of how green infrastructures impact the urban atmosphere interaction. This comprehensive approach allows to capture the urban metabolism to optimize the food-energy-water nexus. In previous works, the impacts have been only studied individually. The analysis will consist of 1) A geo-referenced land-use model to optimize urban and peri-urban food production in terms of nutrients, water, and energy, considering urban morphology and determining life cycle impacts 2) A spatially-temporally resolved framework for quantitative analysis and simulation of green infrastructures to determine the direct and indirect effects on the urban and regional atmosphere. The research will be implemented in two selected cities with different profiles, Barcelona and Oslo. The study ambitions to gather substantial quantitative evidence in green infrastructures and sustainability, contributing to cover the existing gap in previous works. This project and the envisaged: Green infrastructures – A Guide for city planners and policy makers, are timely and urgent. Many cities are implementing green infrastructures despite having little quantitative and comprehensive knowledge as to which infrastructure strategies are more effective in promoting food production, air quality and temperature while reducing environmental impact. This intended Guide will contain evidence-based guidance and tools to create green infrastructure strategies; to help to meet sustainability targets, and promote wider and diffused social benefits. The ground-breaking aspect of this project is to integrate life cycle modelling that quantifies the metabolism of materials and energy associated to green infrastructures with atmospheric modelling to understand how those green infrastructures also affect the urban atmosphere. To do so, I will implement a novel approach in which land and resource use are used to drive both life cycle analysis and atmospheric modelling. The new approach entails the development of new methods to analyze to what extent various green infrastructure combinations can be a source of sustainable food, reduce environmental impacts, and promote a more efficient use of resources in an urban setting. To this end, much progress has already been accomplished. The multidisciplinary team is finally in place and the multidisciplinary work is already visible through articles that have been published in first quartile peer reviewed journals (see dissemination section). We have been able to establish a working relationship with administration of the case study cities to give policy relevance to the research we are doing. We are well underway to present the main end product of this project: the Green Infrastructures Guide, a joint product of all three WPs, extrapolating the relevant outcomes of the two case study cities to develop a set of tools and guidelines that can be applied to other cities in terms of climate, geography, and type of urban metabolism.