Planning for liveable climate-proof green city
Suggested elective: Spatial Analysis of Ecosystem Services: Nature’s Benefits to People
This topic requires insights from multiple disciplines, including urban planning, governance. An interest in ecology, climate change scenarios is desirable, as the ability to read Dutch.
Urban green spaces can provide a lot of benefits to residents, including fresh and cool air, protection from flooding or space to meet others or do sports. To protect and improve urban green spaces, policy makers have to be aware of such benefits. In a series of recent projects, ITC has collaborated with the NGO Tropenbos Suriname to improve our understanding of the role of tropical urban green spaces in liveable climate-proof cities. During these projects data on urban green spaces and potential benefits for residents. These data include a map of the urban green space types, a survey on perceptions of urban green spaces by residents, observation on the management state of public green areas as well as air temperatures of selected green spaces in Paramaribo area, the capital of Suriname. Data collection is partly happening through an ongoing citizen science initiative, in which residents collect spatially explicit data about their surroundings through a small weather sensor and a telephone app every month.
Topic: Explore barriers and opportunities of citizen science monitoring data complementing other information sources to inform policy makers on urban green spaces in the context of climate change. You will:
- Explore urban (planning) policies and regulations on urban green currently existing and in development the Paramaribo area;
- Analyse the actors involved in urban green-related policies and regulations in Paramaribo, specifically their needs for knowledge on urban green spaces and their benefits with expert interviews;
- Assess the existing data sets on the Paramaribo area for the policy needs (eg credibility, salience, legitimacy, feasibility) and their geographic spread over the city;
- Identify barriers and opportunities of these data sets to inform policy makers on a livable climate-proof green city.
www.groenparamaribo.org
Conserving and improving urban green spaces is a wicked problem due to the scarcity of space and financial resources in many urban areas in the Global South. Also, knowledge on the benefits of urban green spaces and how to plan and manage them well is often lacking. This topic has societal impact by targeting one specific city and providing recommendations on how to improve policies that are already existing or in development.