Peri-urban landscapes are the meeting point of a wide range of human activities, power dynamics, and social-ecological processes in the Anthropocene. Multiple interests, as well as differences in governance regimes and decision-making processes increase the complexity of peri‑urban landscapes. With this complexity as a background, we place our focus on the interactions between two highly desirable human activities in peri‑urban landscapes: outdoor recreation and biodiversity conservation. The multifunctional role peri‑urban landscapes can fulfill to respond to biodiversity conservation and outdoor recreation goals has the capacity to minimize the potential clash between these two functions. Despite this, little attention has been paid to the realization of multifunctionality in peri‑urban landscapes when addressing the recreation-conservation nexus. In this Perspective, we provide a foundation for further inter-disciplinary explorations in this area by identifying knowledge gaps and priorities for future research on the recreation-conservation nexus in peri‑urban landscapes with particular emphasis on the “spatial” dimension. 

Understanding residents’ perceptions of green-blue infrastructure (GBI) is critical to ensure continued access to its associated benefits in growing and densifying urban landscapes. Physical availability and accessibility of green spaces alone do not directly translate to actual appreciation and use. Residents’ sense of place can determine if benefits from GBI are realized and how landscape changes may be perceived. In this study, set in sub-urban Stockholm, Sweden, we applied a mixed-methods approach combining mental mapping with follow-up interviews to investigate how such methodology can improve our understanding of residents’ perception of the recreational use of GBI. For the mental mapping exercise, participants drew, freehand, a map of appreciated neighborhood places for recreational purposes. Our results clearly show that mental mapping provides relevant information on individual and collective perceptions of recreational GBI, linkages between green-blue and gray infrastructure elements, and recreational hot-spots of importance to the local inhabitants. The unguided approach to welding local knowledge with spatial expressions makes the method well suited to contribute to a better understanding of plural senses of place with regards to the recreational use of GBI in rapidly urbanizing landscapes and an enhanced capacity to recognise locally appreciated recreational spaces in planning and practical management.

Livability of MediterraneanMediterranean cities is highly challenged by the pressure coming from fast-growing urban expansion and climate-induced hazards. To ensure the wellbeing of its inhabitants, cities need to adopt flexible and dynamic approaches to cope, mitigate and/or adapt to these pressures. In this chapter, we first review population and climate challengesChallenges on the Mediterranean Basin, then we summarize how nature-based solutionsNature-based solutions (NBS) (NBS) promise to be a more flexible alternative than traditional gray infrastructure to reduce the effects of climate change-hazards and support sustainable citiesSustainable cities. We focus in particular on the use of NBS to mitigate urban floodingFloodingand heat wavesHeat waves effects, which are particularly relevant for the Mediterranean region. We then address some of the challengesChallenges connected to the implementation of NBS in the MediterraneanMediterranean: lack of evidence to quantify their short and long-term effectiveness; the difficulty of establishing NBS in dense urban cores with high cultural and historical values; the risks of NBSNature-based solutions (NBS) contributing to inequalities; the need for cross-sector, -actor and -level collaborative governance models; the need for NBS that are resilient to present and future changing conditions; the hidden risk of unintended negative effects of NBS. Lastly, we conclude with some final remarks on the need to collect more empirical evidence of the short and long-term performance of NBSNature-based solutions (NBS) and call for a combined effort of natural and social sciences, stakeholders and industry to advance knowledge on NBS behavior, monitor their efficiency and benefits (or disbenefits) on society and follow up on their performance.

For contemporary, new buildings in contexts like Sweden, life cycle assessments clearly display that embodied carbon often represent more than half of the emissions seen over the life cycle. While policies for many years have targeted operational emissions, limited focus has been on buildings´ embodied carbon. To abate sectoral greenhouse gas emissions, policies for mandatory climate declarations or even limit values for embodied carbon are being introduced. In the Swedish case, a regulation on mandatory climate declarations is in effect from 2022, and limit values are likely to be introduced in the coming years. The need for consistent knowledge on the embodied carbon of contemporary building construction as well as the potential of various mitigation strategies, is therefore critical to step up emissions reductions in the sector. This study aimed at developing robust reference values for embodied carbon, representative for the contemporary new construction in Sweden. Based on assessments of nearly 70 new Swedish building cases, reference values were developed for central building types. The results display a high variation within each building type, thus showcasing considerable emission reduction potentials with available technologies. The study embraces many analyses, among others on the potential effects of various properties of the sampled buildings, such as noise requirements, energy standards and analyses of improvement potentials through greener product supply. The study provides a profound basis for the further development of limit values in for example procurement processes and in regulation for the Swedish context. In an academic perspective the study is unique through the representative building sample, consistent assessment methodology applied for all cases as well as displaying insights into details of the variations of embodied carbon in contemporary construction.

Although potential urban green space accessibility is being discussed widely, specific barriers that affect accessibility are often under-estimated. They do not equate to limited or uneven accessibility nor are they exclusively related to physical settings. Rather, the range of barriers and their complex interactions, including people’s perceptions, personal conditions, and institutional frameworks, make this topic less clear cut and difficult to put into practice for planning purposes. Given the importance of barriers when people make decisions, we present a conceptual framework to capture the cumulative and interactive effects of different barriers on realizing recreational benefits of urban green spaces. The framework classifies physical, personal, and institutional barriers and highlights their interactions based on three case studies: Stockholm, Leipzig, and Lodz. We argue that constraints to the accessibility of urban green spaces are not so much the interactions between various physical, personal, and institutional barriers, but more the significance that beneficiaries assign to them as perceived barrier effects. Studying barriers seeks to improve the knowledge about the non-use of urban green spaces and to enable us to draw conclusions about the actual accessibility of recreational benefits. Deduced from the conceptual framework, three pathways are contrasted for improving accessibility to the recreational benefits of urban green spaces: the environment, knowledge, and engagement. We argue that these pathways should not be a diffuse objective, but a sensitive and scale-dependent re-balance of individual, physical, and institutional factors for considering justice in environmental and green space planning and management. Our systematic conceptualization and classification of multidimensional barriers enables a more comprehensive understanding of individuals’ decisions in terms of accessing recreational benefits. 

A debate about emerging models of urban living labs (ULLs) 2.0 is taking place in the literature, highlighting the importance of social aspects. The aim of this paper is to examine feminist ULLs as a potential source of social sustainability. This is conducted through a case study of a feminist ULL in Sweden, where girls and young women, together with multiple professional stakeholders, used Minecraft to redesign a public square in their neighbourhood - a marginalised suburban area of Stockholm. Data was collected through participant observations of six experimental labs during 1 year, surveys of the ULL participants, and an analysis of the final Minecraft designs. The empirical findings reveal a process of mutual learning between girls and professional stakeholders, where the girls were viewed as place experts. The findings also reveal that the girls’ visions include a socially sustainable transition of the urban square: from patriarchal to inclusive, from grey to green, and from a transit area to a meeting-place. There were some differences between girls and professional stakeholders. Whereas the professionals tended to emphasise security in their visions, the girls emphasised liveability. Although more research is needed, this paper concludes that feminist ULLs can be a possible source of social sustainability. However, the ULL process must both be inclusive, and at the same time unlock long-term transformation in the physical environment.

Greening and green regeneration have been developed as a major strategy for improving quality of life in cities and neighbourhoods. Greening policies and projects are being applied at both the citywide and the neighbourhood level for various reasons, such as adaptation to climate change and the improvement of housing and living conditions as well as wellbeing and health. Urban policies, plans, and programmes have increasingly employed greening strategies to make urban neighbourhoods more attractive, to improve quality of life, and to provide residents with recreational space. At the same time, greening is increasingly “exploited” by marketoriented regeneration and construction strategies. The new critical debates on eco-gentrification—or distributional, procedural, and interactional injustices—are discussing emerging conflicts or trade-offs between green regeneration and the social or housing market impacts, as well as analysing the role of greening and green regeneration with respect to the (re)production of socio-spatial inequalities and injustices. Set against this background, our paper provides a comparative analysis of two cases—Łod´ ´z Stare Polesie(Poland) and Leipzig’s inner east (Germany)—and has a threefold purpose: first, it seeks to analyse interconnections between greening policies and justice concerns. To operationalise the aforementioned interconnections, we will, second, develop an operational model that looks at interconnections as a process and applies a justice perspective that focuses on a multidimensional, intersectional, relational, and context- and policy-sensitive understanding of justice. Third, the paper seeks to detect how a contrasting comparison can help us to come to a better and more comprehensive understanding of the interconnections between green regeneration and justice. The study itself builds on primary research about the two cases from earlier projects. 

While there is evidence that commons have the potential to counteract socio-spatial injustices unleashed by neoliberal and capitalist forms of urbanisation, less is known about how commons lead to emancipatory change. Anchored in dialectical social theory, this article explains commoning as a mechanism through which people reproduce/transform their structural context and agency, arguing that the potential for emancipation through commoning lies in the commoners’ ability to induce processes of structural/agential transformation. Empirically grounded in interviews with urban community gardeners in the City of Stockholm, Sweden, we show that collective gardening conceptualised as practice of commoning contributes to structural change in that female volunteer labour collectivises the mandate over municipally managed public space, transforming socio-spatial relations. Yet, garden commoning proves to reproduce structural whiteness and middle-class agency in public space, fails to establish autonomy from waged-labour relations, and is unable to abolish the separation from the sources of reproduction and subsistence.

Understanding opportunities as well as constraints for people to benefit from and take care of urban nature is an importantstep toward more sustainable cities. In order to explore, engage, and enable strategies to improve urban quality of life, we combine asocial-ecological-technological systems framework with a flexible methodological approach to urban studies. The framework focuseson context dependencies in the flow and distribution of ecosystem service benefits within cities. The shared conceptual system frameworksupports a clear positioning of individual cases and integration of multiple methods, while still allowing for flexibility for aligning withlocal circumstances and ensuring context-relevant knowledge. To illustrate this framework, we draw on insights from a set of exploratorycase studies used to develop and test how the framework could guide research design and synthesis across multiple heterogeneous cases.Relying on transdisciplinary multi- and mixed methods research designs, our approach seeks to both enable within-case analyses andsupport and gradually build a cumulative understanding across cases and city contexts. Finally, we conclude by discussing key questionsabout green and blue infrastructure and its contributions to urban quality of life that the approach can help address, as well as remainingknowledge gaps both in our understanding of urban systems and of the methodological approaches we use to fill these gaps