Introduction
Adapting the metropolitan territories to global change has emerged as one of the greatest challenges for the spatial planning debate. Green spaces within metropolitan areas are recognized to halt biodiversity loss, foster ecosystem functioning and generate multidimensional nature-based solutions (hereafter NBS). NBS have significant potential to advance landscape restoration, to decrease the vulnerability and to enhance urban resilience. A growing body of literature has provided sound reference and knowledge on the potential of NBS (Kabisch et al., 2016, Pauleit et al., 2017; Gulsrud et al., 2018; Konijnendijk, 2021; Kabisch et al., 2022). However, conceptualising, planning and implementing NBS is particularly challenging given the complex spatial configuration, fragmented and changing landscape context in metropolitan areas (Kabisch et al., 2022). Moreover, the relationship between urban society and urban nature is changing, giving rise to new societal values, interests and conflicts in this context (Konijnendijk, 2000 ).
Participatory approaches (i.e. co-design and participatory mapping) have been used to help planners and policy makers design green infrastructure that not only addresses ecological priorities, but also incorporates user demands and needs in green infrastructure design, planning and management (Basnou et al., 2020). Co-design describes the active collaboration among stakeholders in designing solutions to a problem (Vargas et al., 2022). Co-design as a “learning alliance” (Van der Jagt et al., 2019) encourages and empowers NBS knowledge in planning. Participatory mapping (i.e. PPGIS - public participation geographic information system) is a powerful tool to add place-specificity, local knowledge and evidence-base to ecosystem services assessment, urban design, land use planning and green infrastructure management (Brown and Kyttä, 2014; De Vreese et al., 2016a).
However, while the European Commission (Harrak and Lemaitre, 2023) urges that design and implementation of NBS should be co-produced with multiple institutional and civil stakeholders and lessons learnt should be widely shared, the uptake of co-produced NBS into planning and practice has been limited (Roitsch et al., 2024). At the same time, the lack of relevant and contextualized information derived from and feeding participatory approaches has been an important barrier for putting NBS into practice (Van Der Jagt et al., 2023), especially in metropolitan areas.
In this study, we argue that sound informational landscapes can support researchers, planners and policymakers in NBS conceptualization, planning and implementation at complex metropolitan scales (for example the LLobregat River Valley in the Barcelona Metropolitan Area). We define the informational landscape as the relevant and contextualized data on the geographic area and the topic under discussion, informing multidisciplinary actors and aligned with territorial challenges, planning strategies and policy agendas. Although informational landscapes are supportive for including co-design approach into practice, their potential remains insufficiently explored. A solid informational landscape contributes to information literacy (Warschauer, 2004) with the stakeholders and helps them to deal with misinformation. Information literacy includes the capacity and skills to understand and use information on a certain topic, and as such, informational literacy is critical to social inclusion. Moreover, information literacy also helps stakeholders dealing with misinformation, disparities in accessing information, data complexity or specific jargon. Through mutual learning in social networks, co-design and participatory mapping facilitate informational literacy. We use the concept of informational landscapes to generate, understand and use data related to a complex territory and a complex topic; with the people who live, work, know and depend on the studied landscapes acting as information facilitators in a co-production process. The informational landscape is place-based and it implies many informational levels, perceptions and knowledge from various fields (the concept is framed in Box 1).
In order to generate meaningful data and support an evidence-based approach for planning context-adapted NBS in metropolitan landscapes, our research focused on the following objectives: (a) enabling the informational landscape around NBS through a multi-actor perspective; (b) detecting and understanding the potential role of informational landscapes to capture and process local knowledge and stakeholders’ perceptions, and (c) identifying opportunities for actionable and supportive informational landscapes to implement NBS.
Reference:
Corina Basnou, Laura Cid, Eugènia Vidal-Casanovas, Sandra Calduch Fernández, Joan Pino, Javier Gordillo, Patricia Garcia, Helena Sanz, Marta Pérez, Rik De Vreese. 2025. Enabling new informational landscapes for resolving nature-based solutions literacy and planning in Barcelona Metropolitan Area. Urban Forestry & Urban Greening, 105, 128719. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ufug.2025.128719