A stakeholder approach, door opener for farmland and multifunctionality in urban green infrastructure

During the last years Urban Green Infrastructure (UGI) has evolved as a research focus across Europe. UGI can be understood as a multifunctional network of different urban green spaces and elements contributing to urban benefits. Urban agriculture has gained increasing research interest in this context. While a strong focus has been made on functions and benefits of small scale activities, the question is still open, whether these findings can be up-scaled and transferred to the farmland scale. Furthermore, multifunctionality of urban and pert-urban agriculture is rarely being considered in the landscape context. This research aims to address these gaps and harnesses the question if agricultural landscapes - which in many European metropolitan regions provide significant spatial potential - can contribute to UGI as multifunctional green spaces. This work considers multifunctionality qualitatively based on stakeholder opinion, using a participatory research approach. This study provides new insights in pert-urban farmland potentials for UGI development, resulting into a strategy framework. Furthermore, it reflects on the role of the stakeholder involvement for multifunctionality planning'. It suggests that it helps to define meaningful bundles of intertwined functions that interact on different scales, helping to deal with non-linearity of multiple functions and to better manage them simultaneously.