Urban planners and urban planning as a field face a major challenge in balancing urban development interests against the need to safeguard socially equitable and ecologically functional green space. This need is still commonly seen through a modernist lens, whereby large-scale green areas are viewed as an antithesis to the city, creating a polarised landscape seemingly free from cross-scale social and ecological interactions. This study reports on a transdisciplinary work process that aimed to challenge this polarisation by exploring more integrative and operative planning approaches to large-scale urban green structures, using the concept of resilience, both as a theoretical umbrella and in relation to a case study in Stockholm, Sweden. The exploration took the form of a series of workshops in which professionals from the fields of planning, urban design, ecology, landscape architecture, and environmental history, as well as city-wide and regional planning, took part. Throughout the process, tentative designs served as "touchstones", bringing questions from a theoretical level to a hands-on, specific, local context. This paper identifies three ways that resilience science can be useful in the planning and management of large urban green structures. Firstly, resilience can introduce complexity and thus make visible synergies and "win-win" situations within planning. Secondly, in highlighting change, resilience can offer alternatives to present conservationist perspectives on green space planning and thus offer constructive ways out of planning-related deadlocks. Thirdly, resilience can be advantageously combined with the concept of "legibility" in clarifying common goals and thus helping to build a constituency which will sustain large-scale green structures over time.

This paper addresses three interventions into urban green spaces—a wetland in Cape Town, a post- industrial site in New York, and a park outside London. Through their different contexts, they help to grasp a wider phenomenon: the protection of urban nature through the development of protective narratives. We analyze these interventions as examples of “value articulation”, which we view as a relational and sociomaterial practice that requires the enrolment of people, plants, and things that together perform, spread, and deploy stories about why given places need protection. For each case study, we also highlight the moments when narrative practices move beyond mere protection and start to change the very context in which they were developed. We refer to these as projective narratives, emphasizing how novel values and uses are projected onto these spaces, opening them up for reworking. Our analyses of these successful attempts to protect land demonstrate how values emerge as part of inclusive, yet specific, narratives that mobilize and broaden support and constituencies. By constructing spatial linkages, such narratives embed places in wider geographical ‘wholes’ and we observe how the physical landscape itself becomes an active narrative element. In contrast to rationalist and external frameworks for analyzing values in relation to urban natures (e.g., ecosystem services), our ‘bottom-up’ mode situates urban nature in specific contexts, helping us to profoundly rethink planning and practice in order to (i) challenge expert categories and city/nature dichotomies; (ii) provide vernacular ways of knowing/understanding; and (iii) rethink the role of urban designers.

If we are to promote urban sustainability and resilience, social-ecological knowledge must be better integrated in urban planning and design projects. Due to gaps in the two cultures of thinking associated with the disciplines of ecology and design, such integration has, however, proven challenging. In mainstream practice, ecologists often act as sub-consultants; they are seldom engaged in the creative and conceptual phases of the process. Conversely, research aiming to bridgethe gap between design and ecology has tended to be dominated by arelatively static and linear outlook on what the design process is, and what it could be. Further, few concrete examples of the co-production of ecological and design knowledge exist. In this paper, we give an account of a transdisciplinary design proposal for Albano Resilient Campus in Stockholm, discussing how design – seen as a process and an assemblage of artifacts – can act as a framework for co-producing knowledge and operationalizing concepts of resilience and ecosystem services. Througha design-based and action-oriented approach, we discuss how such a collaborative design process may integrate ecological knowledge into urban design through three concrete practices: a) iterative prototyping and generative matrix models; b) designerly mediators or “touchstones”; and c) legible, open-ended, comprehensive narratives. In the conclusion, we sketch the contours of a social-ecological urbanism, speculatingon possible broader and changed roles for ecologists, designers, and associated actors within this framework.