How to govern urban diversity?
Governance issues were a stimulating topic in Malmö Conference in 20-21 September 2017. This finely arranged conference, attracting 270 participants and 35 nationalities, was labeled as ‘Urban Green Infrastructure - Connecting People and Nature for Sustainable Cities’.
Governance problems were discussed from several perspectives, such as green-blue infrastructures, biocultural diversity, climate resilience, social justice, different Urban Lab approaches, and nature-based solutions. Regarding actors in urban green governance, how do they shift roles as they move between partnerships? How to build strategies for diversifying governance without losing legitimacy or accountability? Questions like these were highly relevant to our research project.
The main motivation behind the questions was to study the potential spectrum of governance and facilitate heterogeneous stakeholder networks to participate in urban green governance. This requires bringing government and non-governmental actors together and creating multiple value domains. For instance, new roles were demonstrated in case studies to private homeowners, civic actor networks and private businesses, thus helping their contribution to the environmental, social and institutional resilience of cities.
There were also field visits to widely known green sites of the city, such as Augustenborg district, People’s Park and the Limhamn limestone quarry. This was the final conference of Green Surge, a four-year project funded by the EU, focusing on the social, environmental and economic virtues of urban green infrastructure. Read more about the project from here.
The research poster B2N presented in Malmö.
