Green Infrastructure: Planning for Sustainable and Resilient Small Towns – Evidence from the Seine Valley in France

Green infrastructure has emerged as an effective strategy to achieve sustainable development in urban planning strategies. So far, its use has been broadly promoted in cities and has been less or not adopted at the scale of small towns. This chapter intends to bridge this gap by exploring the potential of green infrastructure in providing diverse ecosystem services crucial to human well-being, urban sustainability, and resilience at the small-town scale. By considering Rives-en-Seine (northwestern France) as a case study, it deploys a methodology grounded in an interactive group workshop involving diverse stakeholders, residents, academics, and students with architecture and environmental engineering backgrounds. The results show that green infrastructure offers a wide range of options that can help address climate change threats. These rely on rethinking green areas management strategies, containing erosive runoffs from agricultural plateaus, valuing wetlands as everyday public spaces, and regreening waterways and riverbanks.