The Role of Community Engagement in Building Sustainable Blue-Green Infrastructure–Best Practices and Case Studies

The concept of blue-green infrastructure (BGI), an essential integral component for a liveable city, is relatively new and finds increasing attention in many cities and countries across the globe. Infrastructure planning should be designed more sensitively to ecological considerations by deploying more nature-driven solutions to address multiple challenges induced by rapid urbanization and climate emergencies in urban areas. BGI promotes an integrated and coordinated approach that integrates blue interventions (emphasizing the physicality of water itself) with green, which represents the network of landscape components including vegetation systems and water bodies helping to promote equity and resilience for sustainable urban futures. BGI are multifunctional and adaptable systems that integrate the principles of hydrology and ecology to design urban features that create win–win solutions for the environment, community and economy. Community participation which embraces the bottom-up approach engaging multiple stakeholders is crucial for effective and successful BGI adoptions. Incorporating the principles of BGI offers projected benefits, such as substantial improvement on water and air quality, mitigating the urban heat island effect, habitat protection, biodiversity conservation, positive impacts on health and well-being etc. The purpose of this chapter is to synthesize and review all successful BGI case studies at different scales across the globe to demonstrate that meaningful community participation is critical to improve BGI sustainability. The intent of this chapter to develop a framework based on the breadth of evidence to demonstrate how local community engagement, local knowledge, opinions and decision-making in BGI projects are recognised as being important for community well-being. This study may help policymakers, environmentalist, urban planners to better understand how the concept of nature-based landscape resilience can potentially help their decision making to prioritise and embrace a more holistic and social inclusive water sensitive urban planning.