The concept of green infrastructure and urban landscape planning: A challenge for urban forestry planning in Belgrade, Serbia

Abstract

The beginning of the 21st century has witnessed a growth in our understanding of the importance of planning urban landscapes in the context of urban population growth and unpredictable climatic conditions. In the search for responses to the challenges set by the development of contemporary urban landscapes, researchers have offered solutions based on the concept of sustainable and resilient cities, whose spatial development would be based on an interdisciplinary approach to strategy development: biodiversity, urban ecological networks and connectivity, multifunctionality and modularity. Although the concepts of a green infrastructure, in their spatial and functional dimensions, allow the application of such strategies, there are still problems when it comes to implementation and measuring the results achieved. At the same time, there is a growing discussion of the important role played by urban forestry in the context of the collaborative planning of urban landscapes and the application of the ideas of a green infrastructure. The key question is: what are the modalities of application of the concept of green infrastructure in the process of planning the development of the modern city and how can the resulting benefits be evaluated? With the modalities of application of the concept of green infrastructure in mind, we discuss its multi-scale and multifunctional dimensions as applied in the case of Serbia. The realisation of the green infrastructure concept is presented through the example of the Urban Forest Management Plan for the City of Belgrade-Mladenovac Municipality. The results of using the spatial-ecological approach in creating the plan and establishing connectivity as a new aim in forest management planning show that the implementation of the green infrastructure concept, and the achieved multifunctional ecosystem values, can be presented on the basis of the parameters of landscape metrics. In light of the new urban world, future research should focus on the application of the landscape ecological approach of the green infrastructure concept in collaborative planning at the urban landscape scale, which allows the creation of ecosystem services and benefits to human well-being.