Santiago

The Santiago Life-Lab aims to provide inclusive green routes, residential eco-landscapes and place-prescribing actions, to connect districts and sports facilities, public facilities and economic centres.

The intention is to make better places delivering air quality regulation, connectivity, runoff regulation, biodiversity, reflecting the local environmental conditions and constraints, and offering lessons for other cities also facing reduced or changing rainfall/drought patterns. This will be achieved through the implementation of the ‘Stgo+ Green Infrastructure Plan’ pilot. This overall city green infrastructure plan will be further co-developed to define governance arrangements, strategies and actions, timetables and a cost-benefit evaluation. It will provide cost-efficient nature-based solutions to tackle air quality and flood problems as well as social segregation and environmental justice issues.

Nature-based solutions will restore brownfield locations and deliver sustainable drainage, with a focus on reducing the effects of storm water events and increasing biodiversity, whilst also providing human health and well-being benefits. These schemes, in both urban and peri-urban locations, will use climate-appropriate, native species. Different maintenance regimes will be tested, incorporating different assemblages of trees and lawn versus native grasses, trees and shrubs. The intention is to provide habitat for birds and insects by taking a simple approach that can be shared and replicated.