Sustainable Urban and Regional Transformation

Sustainable Urban and Region Transformation

Sustainable urban and regional transformation is key to building resilient and healthy cities. Local governments and practitioners are the drivers of this transformation. NetworkNature supports them with tailored resources, guidance and services.

What will our cities look like in the future? How will they balance a growing population, urban densification and intensifying competition over land use with the well-being of people and the planet? And how will they make sure that the choices made in cities don’t result in negative spillovers in the surrounding peri-urban and rural areas? That on the contrary, the urban-regional fabric is cohesive and delivers wellbeing to all its inhabitants and ecosystems? These considerations are at the heart of the concept of sustainable urban and regional transformation.

Local and regional governments and practitioners (i.e. urban planners, landscape architects and developers) play a pivotal role in actively driving such a transition by harnessing regulatory powers (zoning, ecological compensation areas), or adopting nature-positive planning and land management practices. They can also empower private actors and civil society to take action.

Nature-based Solutions play a critical role in this journey. They help our cities tackle different pressing challenges, including climate change, biodiversity loss and the adverse effects they have on our health and wellbeing. They also promote system thinking and integrated approaches across municipal departments such as housing, utilities, public health, urban planning, and transportation. Such interventions lend themselves to an inclusive “whole-of-society" approach with co-creation as an integral element that brings together local and regional authorities, academia, policymakers, practitioners and civil society for creating sustainable and resilient urban living spaces.

The promise of NbS can be realised only if the pace, scale and quality of action accelerate decisively. This is also crucial to meet European and international biodiversity and climate targets. It is imperative to move beyond siloed approaches in municipal departments, and entrenched institutional practices, and to close gaps in ecological knowledge and skills among professional actors and local planning agencies.

NetworkNature addresses these needs by building capacity with local and regional governments and authorities to help them embed NbS in planning and policy processes and adopt nature-positive design and management of urban spaces. The spotlight will be on further developing and expanding the UrbanByNature capacity-building programme and offering demand-based NbS product and service packages, including a range of valuable actionable resources and guidance on the topic.