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Connecting Green Infrastructure with Transportation Planning

DOI

https://doi.org/10.7275/fabos.869

Publication Date

2010

Abstract

The development of green infrastructure planning is increasingly espoused by landscape, conservation, and metropolitan planners as an effective way to create a network of ecological functionality in regions that are otherwise highly impacted by anthropogenic changes. The most common condition is one of expanding metropolitan growth transforming cultivated and natural landscapes into developed ones. Despite its promise, several critical problems arise with green infrastructure planning. We will consider three. The first is that the definition of green infrastructure within the public realm remains highly variable if not embryonic. The second is green infrastructure is a long-term investment whose effects will not be able to be measured until years after implementation, yet there are very few cases of green infrastructure planning that have actually resulted in adopted and implemented plans, which can be used as models of success. And third, although the public benefits of green infrastructure are positive, other forms of regional scale planning have more dominant influence and impacts, most notably transportation planning.

Concerning this last point, our thesis is that green infrastructure and transportation infrastructure have important interactions. Furthermore, transportation infrastructure potentially degrades green infrastructure networks through fragmentation, ecosystem impairment, and loss of connectivity. Mitigating the impacts of transportation infrastructure could potentially be an important asset to green infrastructure planning. Coordination of transportation and green infrastructure holds promise for sustainable development across regional landscapes. We address this thesis by assessing the landscape significance of both green and transportation infrastructure planning and presenting a case study from Maryland, USA.

The case study indicates that there are numerous logical connections between the two types of plans, some of them conflicting. However, it also indicates that there is much research still necessary on green infrastructure, especially in the areas of implementation and efficacy.

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