A green infrastructure planning framework-guidance for priority, hubs and types

Green infrastructure (GI) has become an important tool to achieve sustainability and resilience in cities because of its various benefits, including stormwater management, urban heat island mitigation, air quality improvement, and carbon storage. Most existing studies have often focused on a single aspect, while few studies have incorporated the results of GI analysis into the planning process. To address this gap, we propose a planning framework to prepare the GI intervention solutions, aimed at identifying the priority actions, hubs to extract maximum multifunctionality, and preference types at the regional scale. We applied the planning framework to Wuhan city as a case study, and found an overall significant multifunctional potential. Two-thirds of the benefit pair (including spatial autocorrelation and bivariate spatial autocorrelation for benefits) relationships were found to be positive, and block areas approximately 15% of the total area were recommended as hubs to lay out the GI. Warnings should be received for evidence, revealing that industrial areas have higher requirements for GI that can alleviate the thermal environment and improve air quality. Strong positive correlations between various benefits were found in this area, especially based on a relatively large proportion of existing natural land. Further, we classified the types of GI preference by SOM (Self-organizing map neural network), and found that differentiated GI planning and strategy formulation are required by different types of regions. The planning framework provides intuitive guidance for GI intervention solution making, which can provide planners and government officials a deeper understanding of GI discourse based on clearly explained answers of important decision-making questions.

Automated summary

Green infrastructure plays an important role in achieving sustainability and resilience in cities, but existing studies often focus on one aspect only. To address this, we propose a planning framework that identifies priority actions and central locations for green infrastructure, and classifies GI preferences in different types of areas. In a case study of Wuhan city, we found significant multifunctional potential for green infrastructure and provided warning evidence for industrial areas.