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Public spaces within our cities are being redefined through a wide range of nature-based solutions (NBS) including green spaces. In this chapter, we will focus on public green spaces in the wider sense. If well planned and managed, green spaces can promote social inclusiveness by enhancing the livebility of neighborhoods and promoting the development of social interactions. The creation of new green space does not automatically lead to socially just and inclusive development; co-benefits should be available and accessible to the entire community. Prejudices, marginalization, and discrimination on socioeconomic condition, ethnicity, religion, gender, age, or disability still prevent the equitable distribution of these benefits and need to be fully understood before any planning process is undertaken. The governance of public green spaces is still viewed primarily as a matter for the state or as a purely private activity. It is important, therefore, to identify ways to ensure the integrated and transdisciplinary participation of diverse actors, as is shown in some examples from different countries. The planning and design of green interventions should start with the evaluation of existing or potential trade-offs between environmental and social development. Urban green spaces must be designed as places for multiple and diverse social groups. If all these issues are duly considered and addressed, NBS can serve as climate mitigation and adaptation tools that produce co-benefits for societal well-being, thereby serving as strong investment options for sustainable urban development and making our cities green, healthier, and happier places to live.

How are our cities confronting the challenges posed by a warming climate, the loss of biodiversity, and the increasing urban heat island effect? ― This chapter discusses the opportunities and benefits of applying the concepts of renaturalization and rewilding of cities. It introduces nature-based solutions (NBS) in urban planning that are integrated with the aim to enhance urban resilience and to slow down the biodiversity decline, which can be applied in two areas: through the conception of new green neighborhoods and through the regeneration and regreening of existing but neglected parts of the city, such as postindustrial brownfields or economically weak districts.

Contact to nature is essential for human existence, urban well-being, and a good quality of life. Green spaces in cities – big or small – all contribute to health and well-being. However, many cities do not offer residents easy access to green space within the city. Improving better access and extending gardens and parks will deliver a large number of benefits, such as ecosystem services, better water management for enhanced urban flood control, and slowing down the biodiversity loss, with the potential to restore damaged ecosystems. Furthermore, additional green space and NBS help to keep cities cool during heat waves and improve the urban microclimate.

In this context, NBS and regreening can generate significant benefits for citizens, improve urban health and well-being, and offer an opportunity to effectively deploy nature to resolve major societal challenges ― such as social inclusion, food security, and disaster risk reduction. However, it is essential that the design of NBS is fully integrated with other complementary planning interventions and seeks synergies across all sectors.

Urbanisation, environmental sustainability and property markets are intertwined. Consequently, studies on any of these three topics need to take the other two topics into consideration. By critically reviewing 33 hedonic pricing studies in 16 key journals in the urban studies and environmental policies areas, we summarise quantitative evidence on the price of environmental externalities resulting from China's urbanisation process. We find that Chinese residents are willing to pay more for the access to green space and waterbody as well as the treatment of urban pollution. The cost and benefit of these amenities and disamenities have already been capitalised in house prices. The central and local government in China can leverage market force to encourage, support and facilitate sustainable urban development and environmental protection, instead of directly intervening in the property market by using public resources. Meanwhile, the estimated hedonic price of Urban Green, Urban Blue and Urban Grey helps policymakers to understand the cost and benefit of their urban development decisions. Our review of the papers on Urban Green, Urban Blue and Urban Grey suggests that there have been promising and encouraging development in studies on all three topics in the last decade. The quality and quantity of hedonic price research has been improving notably. However, it is also clear that there is virtually no empirical evidence from the second- or third-tier cities, particularly, regarding Urban Green and Urban Blue investigations. The small number of existing hedonic studies is far from sufficient to draw reliable conclusions about the costs of environmental externality for cities that have not been studied. What works in first-tier cities may not hold elsewhere in China due to the large geographical variation in natural endowment, economic development status and local customs. There are many pieces that are missing from this big picture. More hedonic price studies are needed.

Nature-based solutions (NBS) generate different impacts at the urban scale, such as the ability to regulate water or store carbon, comparable to traditional, gray infrastructures in a more cost-efficient way. On the other hand, by their intrinsic nature, NBS do deliver a series of other services that are commonly defined as social, economic, and environmental cobenefits. These benefits are not always valued in a consistent and complete way, so there is the need to compile a more comprehensive evidence base on the social, economic, and environmental effectiveness of NBS. The chapter attempts to identify a categorization of the existing NBS and define the ecosystem services (ES) provided by them. Furthermore, starting from the results achieved through the definition of the existing NBS frameworks assessment, the chapter will identify a set of key performance indicators KPIs, based on the ES produced by NBS, to measure the economic, social, and environmental benefits generated in by NBS at the urban level taking into account their multifunctional character. In total, 66 key performance indicators have been individuated: 3 for provisioning services, 38 for regulating services, 17 for cultural services, and 8 for supporting services. Each indicator has been associated to a category of ES in order to measure and evaluate the performances of NBS implemented in cities.

Urban green space can be viewed as a preventative public health measure. Nature contributes to health through disease prevention, disease management, and well-being (physical, mental, and social) promotion. Those contributions are based on improvement in health determinants. Nature and green spaces have been related to more physical activity, restoration and less stress, more social capital, and ecosystem services such as better air quality, less traffic noise, less heat island effects, more biodiversity, among others. Nature, vegetation, and green spaces have also been associated with better mental health, immune system, metabolic system, pregnancy outcomes, reduced cardiovascular disease, and premature mortality. This chapter presents the connections between nature and health, describing how nature impacts key health determinants, how those health determinants are associated with health outcomes (i.e. diseases, injuries, deaths), and provides examples of urban nature interventions that have been related to public health.

Although people have always been aware of the role and importance of green space, trees, and other nature in cities, wider recognition and policy support is of a much more recent date, for example in the context of current climate and public health challenges. The nature-based solutions concept has emerged as a strong, recent attempt for “mainstreaming” of nature in political, planning, and economic areas. Starting from a description of the role of nature in cities, this chapter introduces the nature-based solutions concept and its current spread and implementation in an urban context. It also raises some questions about the next steps in implementing the concept, perhaps moving away from too much focus on a utilitarian view of nature and ecosystem and toward considering nature as a framework for all planning and decision-making.

As a sustainability initiative with the backing of civil society, business, or government interests, urban agriculture can drive green gentrification even when advocates of these initiatives have good intentions and are aware of their exclusionary potential for urban farmers and residents. I investigate this more general pattern with the case of how urban agriculture became used for green gentrification in Denver, Colorado. This is a city with many urban farmers that gained access to land after the Great Recession but faced the contradiction of being a force for displacement and at risk of displacement as the city adopted new sustainability and food system goals, the housing market recovered, and green gentrification spread. I argue that to understand this outcome, it is necessary to explain how political economy and cultural forces create neighborhood disinvestment and economic marginalization and compel the entrance of urban agriculture initiatives due to their low-profit mode of production and potential economic, environmental, and social benefits. Central to how urban agriculture initiatives contribute to green gentrification is the process of revalorization, which is how green growth machines repurpose such initiatives by drawing on their cultural cachet to exploit rent gaps. I conclude with a set of hypotheses to help other scholars test the conditions under which urban agriculture is more or less likely to contribute to green gentrification. Doing so may help nuance convictions about the benefits of urban agriculture within the context of entrenched inequalities in rapidly changing cities.

In recent years, a great deal of work has emerged on eco-cities in China. Specifically, writers have discussed the role of the entrepreneurial state in the construction of eco-cities and have noted the role of these cities in the production of high-end real estate and new forms of capital accumulation and land acquisition. Whilst this chapter supports these arguments, we argue that the emergence of eco-cities in China is tied up with broader socioeconomic and cultural discourses and discourses of governance. We explore these ideas through a qualitative investigation of an eco-city known as the North Lake (Beihu) Ecological New Town (NLENT) located in the city of Jining, Shandong province. Specifically, this project, which involved the collection of documents, photographs and 20 semi-structured interviews, aims to understand the role that discourses of class, taste and consumption play in the fashioning of Chinese eco-cities. In exploring discourses of ‘green conduct’, this chapter also seeks to understand the role of eco-cities in the governmental fashioning of Chinese subjects and bodies. In this regard, this chapter suggests that whilst new forms of green development have played a part in urban expansion, new green real estate zones such as the NLENT have a powerful role to play in the construction and shaping of Chinese identity and behaviour.

The Ruhr region is a long-term showcase for the implementation of nature-based solutions (NBS) as part of regional and local development policies. With the implementation of the Emscher Landscape Park and the ecological renewal of the Emscher River System, a fundament for new and integrated strategies and projects was created. The Ruhr Region was inspired by the models, strategies, and discussions of the EU to test and implement ES, NBS, and GI in the last 10 years. The planners were also following the two competing national discussions in Germany to interpret GI more in the context of sustainable urban development or more as nature protection and biodiversity. In 2016, the Ruhr Region published a first own GI strategy named Green Infrastructure Ruhr, which was designed as an integrated and multi-level strategy with five operative fields of action for the whole region: (1) Urban Landscape, (2) Water in the City, (3) Green Urbanism, (4) Climate-friendly Mobility, and (5) Climate Protection and supporting Energy Efficiency. The conceptional and political discussions about this approach in the region are still going on. The author recommends changing the perception of NBS from green conceptual and academic perspective to operative policy and management. NBS can be developed as real urban infrastructures. Our societies are well trained to run, to finance, and to maintain various infrastructure systems. It is time to take operative responsibility for NBS in our cities and regions.