Making Green Work addresses the need of urban stakeholders for new capacities to enable green-blue and climate adaptation infrastructure while fostering synergistic economies at the neighbourhood scale.
Amidst the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, the European Commission wants to align the Biodiversity Strategy of the European Green Deal (EGD) with restoring local economies. This strategy calls on European cities over 20.000 people to develop ‘Urban Greening Plans’ by 2030. The EGD points at the widely accepted benefits of green urban spaces, ranging from health, recreation, refuge to nature, and mitigation of climate change. More importantly, it points at how the extensive deployment of green infrastructure in urban and periurban areas has the potential to have a positive economic impact in cities: new related jobs can help tackle inequalities and ensure a just transition to climate neutrality. Yet, effective tools and practical implementation models to unlock socioeconomic impact connected to urban greening are missing. Making Green Work addresses the need of urban stakeholders for new capacities to enable green-blue and climate adaptation infrastructure while fostering synergistic economies at the neighbourhood scale. For that, Making Green Work integrates: 1) spatial typologies and places for green work; 2) relevant policies, business and technologies; and 3) action-embedded pedagogies for behavioral change.
This research collaboration with the Municipality of Almere and the Floriade 2022 Knowledge Program, in association with other (inter)national partners, deals with understanding the spatial planning and design conditions supporting the deployment of infrastructures for the green transition and related green jobs in cities. What will nature-inclusive area development mean for the economic profile of Almere and the associated jobs? Questions being touched upon in this project include: How to increase the public acceptance of new infrastructures supporting the green transition? How to align such project with place identities, including types of landscape and labor skills? What are the precise spatial design implications and needs of such infrastructures? How can those needs be integrated into an urban setting?
Partners: Work Agenda Pampus, Gemeente Almere; Floriade 2022; Innovation and Technology for Development Centre, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Department of Landscape Architecture, Harvard Graduate School of Design.
Duration of the project: 2021-ongoing
Principal investigators: Víctor Muñoz Sanz, Tanja Herdt
