Case studies

The main objective of the São Paulo Life-Lab is to fast-forward the urban green transition by harnessing the ecosystem services of urban forests, and while doing so, tackling socio-environmental inequalities through NBS co-creation.

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The main objective of the Life-Lab is to collaboratively design nature-based solutions (NBS) to restore, rehabilitate and promote the adaptive management of hydro-social systems present in peri-urban territories, and by doing so tackling the consequences of urban sprawling, while increasing ecosystem services provision, resilience to climate change and ensuring a fair and equitable distribution of nature’s benefits.
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Within the CONEXUS project, Santiago’s Life-Lab, Laboratorio BioUrbano, is an inter-sectoral partnership between academics, public institutions, private actors, and civil society. With the aim of co-producing urban nature-based solutions (NBS) to address the important challenges faced by the city.
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With a network of over 25 partners across public and non-government sectors, the Life-Lab establishes multidisciplinary communities of learning to investigate and co-design NBS in order to counter a palette of harmful effects of urbanisation in the MRBA. These include, among others, air pollution, environmental degradation, and habitat loss as well as diminishing natural stormwater treatment functions, soil permeability, and water retention capacities of urban ecosystems.
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LISGREEN establishes two nature-based solutions (NBS) pilots, RENATURA and Ruas Verdes+. RENATURA is in an area where the Eastern Green Corridor of Lisbon crosses the inner city, in the Areeiro Parish, characterised by no major building complexes and with NBS already in place. Ruas Verdes+ is delivered in the Actores (Areeiro), Arroios, and Penha de França neighbourhoods, characterised by dense, grey, and pressured urban surfaces, acute road traffic and several other constraints.
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In the context of the CONEXUS project, 47 of the 189 municipal allotments are being monitored by the Observatori d’Horts urbans (or ‘Urban Allotment Observatory’), a key legacy of the city’s Strategy for Urban Agriculture 2019-2030. Led by Barcelona Regional, a technical agency specialised in strategic urban planning and infrastructure, and in partnership with Barcelona City Council, the Urban Allotment Observatory analyses the ecosystem services and socio-environmental benefits of urban allotments, linking them to the city’s green infrastructure, and enhancing the evidence-base of urban agriculture’s integrated benefits for citizens and the environment.
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The Valdocco Vivibile Life-Lab establishes a community of learning around urban NBS for ecosystem restoration, multifunctional ecosystem services, biodiversity enhancement, and social inclusion, promoting multi-stakeholder partnerships and collaborative leadership. It creates mechanisms for involving citizens, academia, and public, private, and third sectors at different governance scales through a powerful communication and dissemination strategy. A key element is the involvement of local schools and pupils in the co-creation of a public communication campaign to raise awareness of and build a shared knowledge on climate change and sustainability-related issues.
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The city’s green and blue areas are an important and integrated part of the city of Malmö, as reflected in the recent Master Plan. The ambitions of the Plan are to create a close, dense, green and mixed functioning city, with densification as a driver, rather than expansion into the outside highly productive farmland.
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The current city government, in coordination with other municipalities of the AMVA, focused its development plan (Plan de Desarrollo) priorities of implementing actions to improve the urban environment, including Nature-Based interventions from the neighbourhood to the metropolitan scale, with the support of diverse stakeholders: public institutions, private actors, civil society organisations and academic bodies.
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In the second part of the 20th century, three major challenges led towards a new thinking and the implementation of river restoration as a nature-based solution for the Isar river.
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The project aims to tackle climate change, poverty and food provision, by supporting urban gardens in public or private land with community participation. The aims being food security and sovereignty, environmental management, employment and income improvement, social inclusion, sustainability and resilience.
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Xochimilco is an important tourism attraction of Mexico City, and in this sense, public policies have been focused in conservation, tourism infrastructure and ecotourism. Therefore, addressing social and environmental challenges are now a priority though actions including: the dredge and cleaning of the canals, garbage collection and reforestation on channels, exotic species control, improving hydraulic infrastructure, Axolotl conservation, Chinampas rehabilitation, and productivity projects.
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Controlling and mitigating the heat island effect in Arará slum, northern Rio de Janeiro, based on the development and monitoring of green roofs, using epiphytes or lithophytes. Given the common uses of cement or metal, tiles required the development of specific techniques and materials to allow for the growth of vegetation while keeping the overall weight low for safety.

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Developing a green infrastructure plan in Santiago as a shared territorial strategy and a means of unifying different stakeholders relevant for decision making and implementation at different spatial scales. This was achieved through a participatory approach including multiple stakeholders, workshops, and collective mapping sessions. This approach identified the principal issues, the justification of the plan, the goals, and the key spatial components.

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This case study examines in particular the interface between four sets of plans and strategies, providing important context for further examination of meso- and micro-scale interventions covered in subsequent sections. This case also touches on other formally adopted plans and strategies only in relation to the above meso- and micro- scale initiatives, in an attempt to better understand contexts.

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São Paulo was a small village by the end of the 19th century. This village used to lie on top of the hills, surrounded by an exuberant Atlantic Rainforest and savanna, locally known as Cerrado. However, this natural landscape shifted significantly ever since, with the fast expansion of the city, mainly after the second half of the 20th century. The development of the city occurred at the expense of the natural environment, with a significant loss of biodiversity, and the addition of alien species to the city. Out of the more the 3,000 tree species from the Atlantic Rainforest, a world hotspot of biodiversity, only 577 are currently found in the city although, they must coexist and compete with an additional 185 exotic species. Most of these exotic species, introduced by projects of landscape design in public spaces and private properties. There is, however, a recent growing trend of reintroducing and restoring to some extent the ecosystems that were previously found in the area occupied by the city today.

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