title: Urban green spaces in transition: Planning and urban social-ecological resilience in the Frankfurt Rhine-Main region
Creators: name: Dörder, Pinar
Publisher: name: UNSPECIFIED
Year: 2022

description: This study emphasizes the significance of urban green spaces in the fast growing middle-sized towns in the Frankfurt Rhine-Main region in Germany and investigates the transitions these spaces are currently undergoing. As the local impacts of a changing climate are now more severe and frequent, the role of urban green spaces in local climate regulation is becoming increasingly important. At the same time, the current settlement growth pressure in growing regions reached unprecedented levels, and ‘inner before outer development’ is a resourceful strategy to enable settlement growth by mobilizing inner area potentials before resorting to the outer. Though this is, in fact, a land-use conflict: Are green spaces spatial reserves for inner development, or are they natural resources for climate adaptation, biodiversity, and recreation, or can they be both? Inner development, particularly within the framework of the accelerated procedures of the Building Code and the minimum density values specified by the Hessian State Development Plan, is likely to bring higher levels of soil sealing in the already existing built-up areas, where green spaces are needed the most. This would be an unfavorable outcome for a well-functioning green infrastructure that is ideally interconnected, evenly distributed, and serving each individual equally. For the studied case, the fastest growing middle-sized towns in the region are investigated to understand the extent and the implications of this transition. The study therefore benefits from urban governance and growth literature on one hand and the landscape ecology literature on the other. Two lines of inquiry guide the research: (i) understanding the phenomenon of resource conflict by exploring the extent to which urban growth impacts urban green spaces, and (ii) understanding the context of resource conflict by explaining how planning processes, its institutions and governance accompany urban growth. The research shows that social-ecological systems thinking can be the basis for an empirical investigation of urban green spaces through a replicable methodology. This is promising for the planning practice given the limitations in operationalizing the abstract goals such as sustainability or resilience. The results are relevant for three main issues. First, the empirical parts of this study function as a social-ecological reading of the German spatial planning system. It is found that the region, as an administrational level and a planning scale, steers the inevitable contradictions between the supralocal and local planning through certain predetermined flexibilities. Second, it is found that the protection, provision, and maintenance of green spaces with high social and ecological value are highly vulnerable to institutional capacities. Finally, the spatial analysis of green space parameters and their social and ecological value proves beneficial for the development of a citywide green concept for the towns undergoing transitions. A certain level of both expansion and density is indeed needed for efficiently and effectively functioning urban areas. This research shows that despite inevitable tradeoffs, systematic approaches can help detect the potential for resourceful settlement growth.