Resilience of urban landscape: integrating natural areas and urban planning

Abstract

Population growth and climate change make urban centers one of the most environmentally and socially vulnerable areas. This situation requires urgent measures to plan cities to make them more resilient to social-environmental problems such as floods, landslides, surface water pollution, temperature rise, among others.Urban green infrastructure is one of the efficient strategies to provide multiple environmental and social benefits in cities. However, its location must be planned to maximize these benefits with a holistic approach, given limited resources and climate change, ensuring an improvement in the quality of urban life for the entire population. In this context, this project aims to develop a spatial model to support decision-making to identify priority areas for increasing green infrastructure in urban centers. For this purpose, a Multicriteria Assessment (MCE) will be used, and the criteria and respective weights will be defined through a participatory technique with consultation with specialists from different areas related to the study objective. The information plans needed to generate the criteria maps will be extracted from land-use/land-cover maps, hydrographic network, digital elevation model, road network, socioeconomic data, among others. The criteria will be identified by four priority themes, each represented by a map of priority areas: biodiversity, water resources, climate change, and social well-being. In the end, the four maps will be aggregated to form a single map of priority areas for the increase of green infrastructure, which will be superimposed on the official territorial planning maps at the municipal level. The spatial model will allow planners to guide the future development of green infrastructure in candidate areas, increasing the resilience of the urban environment to local biodiversity, the hydrological cycle, and the population's quality of life in the face of climate change. (AU)