Urban Transformation towards
Blue-Green Infrastructures (UT-UBGI)

Work package 3: Policy narratives and conflicts

Project description

The wider implementation of blue-green infrastructures can make an important contribution to making cities more liveable, increasing urban biodiversity and improving resilience to extreme weather events such as heatwaves and heavy rainfall. The Helmholtz project "Urban transformations towards blue-green infrastructures", which has been started in October 2024, aims to drive tangible urban transformations through the development, planning and assessment of blue-green infrastructures, using an inter- and transdisciplinary approach involving both academics and practitioners. Three Helmholtz institutes - the Helmholtz Centre Hereon, the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology and the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research - are participating in the three-year project. 

Implementing urban blue-green infrastructure (UBGI) often generates conflicts – for example, disputes over whether to use brownfield sites for new construction or green space development, or debates about converting sealed parking areas back to permeable surfaces. These conflicts stem from diverging goals, interests, and values among stakeholders, and are shaped by the competing narratives that different actors bring to the table. Such narratives can either facilitate or hinder UBGI implementation. Dr. Josef Kaiser and Dr. Annegret Haase from the Department of Urban and Environmental Sociology, together with Prof. Dr. Sina Leipold from the Department of Environmental Politics, are leading a work package that investigates these UBGI-related conflicts and narratives. The work package aims at developing novel methodological approaches that combine discourse and conflict analysis to generate actionable knowledge for successful and just urban sustainability transformations in the UBGI domain.