Perspectives on Urban Greenspace: Is the Grass Really Greener Now 20 Years On?
Kirk Enu, contributor to 51/4, comments on the issue and its lessons
Twenty-two years ago, Built Environment published a Perspectives on Urban Greenspace issue to establish a shared foundation for what was then called ‘greenstructure’ and to argue that greenspace belonged at the core of urban planning rather than at its fringes. Contributors to that issue defined the concept, mapped its functions and aligned European approaches to show that connected green networks were essential for ecological health, recreation, and urban quality of life. Looking from today’s vantage point, in an era defined by accelerating urban and climate pressures, this new issue revisits that agenda through a broader geographical lens that recognises how cities, not in only Europe but also Global South regions such as Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa, are advancing greenspace planning in distinctive ways that offer equally important insights for global practice. The challenge is to assess how far greenspace implementation has progressed, identify the governance and land constraints that still limit it and determine what must change for Green Infrastructure (GI) and Nature-based Solutions (NbS), as an umbrella term for related concepts that has since emerged (Pauleit et al., 2017), to deliver lasting urban transformation.
A Shifting Conceptual Landscape
Mell’s (2025) retrospective sets the stage by tracing GI’s evolution since the mid-1990s and how core principles such as multifunctionality, connectivity and accessibility have travelled globally and morphed into related concepts such as urban forestry in North America and Australia, sponge city in China (figure 1) or water-sensitive urban design in Australia. At the same time, he highlights how these ideas are interpreted very differently in dense Asian mega-cities, in Latin American contexts shaped by indigenous knowledge and contested governance and in African cities where formal and informal land rights overlap. GI and NbS emerge as ‘bridging concepts’ whose flexibility has allowed broad uptake in policy and practice, but whose very malleability makes them dependent on the political economies, land regimes and institutional capacities into which they are inserted. The contributions that follow explore what happens when these concepts encounter the hard realities of urban governance across Europe, Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa.
Figure 1: Tianjin’s Qiaoyuan Park
Shared Advances and Persistent Barriers
Each region featured in this issue carries its own (historical) urbanisation trajectory and institutional change. Latin America has rapidly transforming metropolitan regions; Sub-Saharan Africa is experiencing rapid expansion, especially in medium- and small-sized cities and often institutionally stretched cities; and Europe features mature, capacity-rich planning systems. Unsurprisingly, these differing trajectories colour how GI and NbS are conceived and implemented. Yet the articles in this issue collectively show that the ideas behind GI and NbS move more easily across regions than the systems required to put them into practice.
Figure 2: Urban greenspace in Santiago
In Latin America, the analysis of Santiago, Bogotá and Lima by Vásquez et al. (2025) reveals how progressive greening policies and instruments can co-exist with deep socio-spatial inequalities (figure 2). Urban vegetation is changing and, in some cases, expanding, but policies often lack the budgets, human resources, monitoring mechanisms, and explicit equity safeguards needed to ensure that new green investments reach those most under-served. In Sub-Saharan Africa, the challenge is less one of unequal policy impact and more one of institutional fragility. Examining the City of Tshwane, Du Plessis and Breed (2025) detail how land invasions, scarce resources, conflicting mandates, and overlapping land rights undermine officials’ ability to prioritise GI for implementation, even when its value is recognised. Building on work in Ghana’s Greater Kumasi Metropolitan Area, Enu and Pauleit (2025) demonstrate through hydrological modelling that integrated NbS scenarios combining river restoration and wetland creation can significantly reduce flood peaks, yet the governance structure needed to realise and maintain such scenarios is weak. In Europe, Hansen et al. (2025) analyse Urban Nature Plans in German cities as an emerging instrument to integrate biodiversity and climate goals, while Pauleit et al. (2025) use detailed micro-climatic modelling in Munich to demonstrate the potential of urban trees and green spaces for reducing heat and stormwater risks. However, even as a model case, implementation faces its political and economic limits. Trees have been shown to cool neighbourhoods, yet these benefits are often undermined where underground parking garages required by car-oriented planning replace them (figure 3). Urban Nature Plans signal promising integration of biodiversity and climate goals, yet their impact remains constrained by political commitment and administrative capacity, which tend to be strongest in already established ‘green champion’ cities.
Figure 3: Old trees in Munich’s older residential areas under threat
Taken together, these perspectives reveal a consistent global pattern where the conceptual progress with GI and NbS are now widely recognised, diversified and supported by growing empirical evidence; political uptake is expanding across all regions; and transdisciplinary collaborations, from urban living labs to city –research partnerships, are becoming standard practice. However, persistent failures arise from misalignment between ambition and the institutional, political and land-use systems with which greening must be implemented. Limited budgets and monitoring mechanisms, institutional fragmentation, informality, structural inequities and growth-driven land regimes continue to restrict who benefits from greenspace and where it is created. GI and NbS also often remain compensatory rather than transformative under prevailing development pressures. If the question 20 years ago was how to place greenspace on the planning agenda, the question today must be on how GI and NbS can reshape development trajectories, confront structural inequalities and deliver long-term resilience rather than isolated green pockets.
What Must Change for the Next 20 years
The contributions in this issue point towards a shared agenda by showing that the next phase of urban greening will depend less on new concepts and more on how cities translate them into practice within their own land, governance and social realities. Hence, GI and NbS must be better grounded in locally defined priorities so that justice and land questions become central to planning and not peripheral. It also shows that change requires multi-scalar governance and long-term stewardship that connect international and national ambitions to neighbourhood-level decisions and community partnership. A further insight is that evidence must shape real planning choices and that cities must move beyond pilots and build integrated approaches that link greening with mobility, climate and development pathways.
The insights provided by the editors and contributors to this issue offer a picture that is both hopeful and sobering because the grass is greener in many places but often unevenly, despite the systems within which cities cooperate. Engaging with the contributions helps reveal where progress is tangible, where barriers remain, and what kinds of institutional change will be needed if greener cities are to become fairer and more resilient ones.
REFERENCES
Du Plessis, T. and Breed, C. (2025) Finding recourse for public sector urban green infrastructure uptake in the City of Tshwane and beyond. Built Environment, 51(4).
Enu, K.B. and Pauleit, S. (2025) Moving NbS from concept to action in Sub-Saharan Africa: strategic pathways for scaling implementation. Built Environment, 51(4).
Hansen, R., Enderich, L. and Davis, M. (2025) Urban nature plans: strategic tool for integrated biodiversity and climate planning in German cities. Built Environment, 51(4).
Mell, I. (2025) Is the grass always greener? A retrospective analysis of green infrastructure planning post-1994. Built Environment, 51(4).
Pauleit, S., Erlwein, S., Feder, S., Linke, S. ans Zölch, T. (2025) Climate resilient green cities of the future: building evidence for action. Built Environment, 51(4).
Pauleit, S., Zölch, T., Hansen, R., Randrup, T. B. and Van den Bosch, C.K. (2017) Nature-based solutions and climate change–four shades of green, in Nature-Based Solutions to Climate Change Adaptation in Urban Areas. Springer: Cham, pp. 29–49. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-56091-5_3
Vásquez, A., Giannotti, E., Galdámez, E., Dobbs, C., Amaya-Espinel, J.D., Marques, T. and Ramírez, P.L. (2025) Towards Greener Cities in Latin America: the role of policies in shaping urban vegetation dynamics. Built Environment, 51(4).
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Listing Image/Image 1: Tianjin’s Qiaoyuan Park, an early example of a sponge city. (Source: CC-BY 4.0 Mydogistiaotiaohu, via Wikimedia)
Image 2: Urban greenspace in Santiago where distribution remains uneven despite substantial green assets. (Sourse: Francisco Kemeny via Unsplash)
Image 3: Old trees in Munich’s older residential areas are threatened by urban densification and the demand for more underground parking spaces. (Source: all rights reserved S. Erlwein)
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