Can Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA) contribute towards the implementation of biophilic urbanism in urban planning? The case of Chilean Municipal Regulatory Plans
Introduction
The recent COVID-19 crisis underscored our need to be more in contact with nature. Nature has the ability to improve our health and well-being, thus highlighting the importance of increasing the greening of cities (Cree and Robb, 2021; Honey-Rosés et al., 2020; Kleinschroth and Kowarik, 2020; McDonald and Beatley, 2021; Roe and McCay, 2021; Volenec et al., 2021). These needs are also addressed in the New Urban Agenda adopted in 2017, which states the urgent requirement of including environmental considerations into city planning, such as the integration, protection, and conservation of natural spaces and elements (United Nations [UN], 2017).
Biophilic urbanism, implemented in ‘biophilic cities,’ is becoming recognized as a relevant approach in this regard due to its emphasis on the inclusion of natural elements into the planning and design of cities (Bay and Lehmann, 2017; Tabb, 2020). It is also associated with improving inhabitants' health and well-being, which is another positive effect of the regular exposure to nature (Aruta, 2021; Gullone, 2000). According to Beatley, the biophilic city “is at its heart a biodiverse city, a city full of nature, a place where in the normal course of work and play and life residents feel, see, and experience rich nature” (2011: p. 45). In this regard, the University of Virginia initiated in 2011 a project called the Biophilic Cities Project, after which in 2013 the Biophilic Cities Network (denoted by this research as BCN) was launched.
On the other hand, the Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA) process, which aims to increase sustainability, in this case of cities, should consider social, economic, governmental, and ecological aspects (Partidário, 2012). In addition, it has recently been highlighted because of its influence towards a stronger consideration of human health issues in city planning decision-making (Fischer and González, 2021). In this regard, biophilic urbanism contributes to the ecological, governmental and human health dimensions to be reached, not being just focused on greening cities but also integrating the landscapes and native vegetation to the city from a sustainable and formative point of view.
The New Urban Agenda also stresses the value of monitoring the urban planning process through indicators to track the progress in including these environmental issues (UN, 2017). In this context, biophilic cities continuously evaluate their ‘biophilic’ progress, employing indicators that “judge the biophilic bona fides of a city” (Beatley, 2011, p. 46), which are primarily based on the twenty proposed biophilic indicators coined by Beatley (2011). These indicators addressed cities dimensions such as physical conditions, infrastructure, activities of their residents, governance priorities, and citizens' commitment, among others.
Likewise, the SEA process uses monitoring indicators to track the plan's effectiveness and redesign indicators to evaluate the reformulation of the plans, respectively (Therivel and Partidário, 2013). Hence, today the SEA is a mandatory process applied to urban planning.
Drawing on this background, the relevance of extending the biophilic planning and design of cities to the so-called ‘Global South’ is acknowledged (Beatley, 2017a, Beatley, 2017b; Lehmann, 2021; McDonald and Beatley, 2021; Sarfraz, 2021; Tabb, 2020). In this context, Chile, the empirical focus of this research, presents several shortcomings stressed by the New Urban Agenda. The country has an urbanization rate of 88%, with cities characterized by poor quantity and quality of green public spaces, considerable public health problems, such as overweight and sedentary lifestyles, high levels of air pollution, and urban social segregation (Ministry of Housing and Urbanism [MINVU], 2014; Mora et al., 2018; OECD, 2013; Salinas and Vio, 2003). Chile shows awareness of the needs stressed in light of the New Urban Agenda, and several key policies, strategies, plans, and laws have identified and acknowledged the challenges Chilean cities face. In this context, some objectives pursued by biophilic urbanism, which appears as a promising approach for re-naturalizing cities, could help to overcome these challenges (See Appendix A).
Accordingly, Chile has received recommendations regarding integrating natural habitats and green spaces in cities' planning and design (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development [OECD], 2016). In this context, local governments create Municipal Regulatory Plans (PRC), which are the primary land-use planning tools at the city level, regulating issues that overlap with the application of biophilic urbanism. Since 2010, the Chilean Environmental Law has stated that the creation of new PRCs, or any amendments of in-force ones, must be compulsorily pursued through the SEA for its final approval.
In recent years, SEA has been applied to support sustainable decision-making, including ecological sustainability in planning, especially at the urban scale (Fischer and González, 2021; Geneletti, 2011; Geneletti et al., 2016). Although biophilic urbanism, ecosystem services, and nature-based solutions approaches have been developed according to different conceptual frameworks, they share a common goal: to make cities greener. Some generic biophilic elements, such as urban green spaces, forests, or waterways, are recognized as relevant nature-based solutions (Breuste et al., 2020; Reeve et al., 2015). Moreover, ecosystem services are acknowledged as benefits derived from biophilic urbanism (Cabanek et al., 2020; El-Baghdadi and Desha, 2017; Marshall and Williams, 2019; Newman et al., 2012), and biophilic cities are characterized by the provision of a wide range of ecosystem services (McDonald and Beatley, 2021). For example, as part of the Biophilic Cities Network, Birmingham operationalized its vision of “becoming the first UK's biophilic city by 2031” through seven principles integrated within its urban policies, being the ecosystem services one of them (Littke, 2016). The ecosystem services approach has a more developed and sophisticated theoretical background than biophilic urbanism regarding measurement, assessment, and monitoring. Biophilic urbanism, on the contrary, is mainly focused on how nature is incorporated into cities' urban planning and design. The biophilic urbanism approach has a more strategic orientation, integrating biophysical, social, institutional, and psychological subjects and processes. Because biophilic urbanism centers on city planning and design, its relationship with the Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA) is more substantial because SEA has a broad pool of urban planning tools as objects of study (policies, plans, and programs). Biophilic urbanism looks for increasing ecosystem services inside cities and assesses topics such as collectivity, governmental and community engagement, and environmental education, bringing a social dimension and well-being to urban planning and design.
Although these concepts related to biophilic urbanism have been addressed under the context of SEA, biophilic urbanism as an approach does not have explicit practical applications associated with the implementation of the SEA decision-making framework worldwide so far. Nowadays, the main challenges of urban planning are (1) maintaining and designing cities as sustainable and livable places, where greening strategies become crucial (Haaland and van den Bosch, 2015; Haase et al., 2017), and (2) reconnecting urban dwellers with nature, improving their well-being (Tan and Jim, 2017). In this context, biophilic urbanism and SEA are presented as two approaches that, given the combination of their methods, would allow achieving significant progress towards the Sustainable Development Goal 11 (SDG11) of ‘Sustainable Cities and Communities.’ Accordingly, biophilic urbanism arises as an approach that presents a broader set of initiatives for stressing the relationships between nature and cities, and the SEA process that seeks the insertion of environmental considerations at the highest levels of decision-making appears as a potential ally to promote this greening within urban planning utilizing and combining the indicators both created.
Against this background, this paper aims to explore whether the SEA might arise as a contributor to the inclusion of a biophilic approach into Chilean local governments' planning by answering the following research question: to what extent are the biophilic elements or initiatives inserted in PRCs through the SEA process followed by local governments?. To do so, we examine and analyze the monitoring and redesign indicators comprising the SEA report. More specifically, we search for key terms associated with the biophilic elements through content analysis (Krippendorff, 2004; Mascarenhas et al., 2015). This allows determining which indicators would be similar to the BCN indicators and exploring which main BCN categories are present or absent in these reports. Furthermore, we asked the local governments linked with those reports about their perception regarding the relevance of implementing biophilic urbanism and the most feasible BCN indicators to be implemented in future SEA processes.
To the best of our knowledge, there is no previous research linking the principles of biophilic urbanism with the SEA through the indicators both contain, specifically in terms of how SEA might arise as a contributor to the biophilic approach's inclusion. There has been some earlier research on these topics, addressing the use of biophilic urbanism and SEA indicators individually. For instance, the application of biophilic indicators in urban planning was studied by Ziari et al. (2018), who assessed 15 urban planners' opinions about the most effective and important indicators to promote environmental considerations in Tehran. Eid et al. (2021) explored the application of biophilic indicators in Cairo. There has also been research linking SEA with concepts related to biophilic urbanism, such as ecosystem services and nature-based solutions. Rozas-Vásquez et al. (2018) analyzed five Chilean local government's SEA reports using content analysis to assess the presence of the ecosystem services terms. Moreover, Partidário and Gomes (2013) present ten Portuguese cases of SEA, where the identification, quantification, and valuation of ecosystem services are examined.
This paper provides a methodological contribution to the study of biophilic urbanism and the field of strategic environmental assessment from two perspectives. Firstly, the paper employs and conducts the first assessment of the indicators stated by the cities comprising the Biophilic Cities Network (BCN), created to evaluate their ‘biophilic’ progress. Secondly, it presents a novel exploration of the linkages between the principles of biophilic urbanism and a decision-making tool assessed by SEA, the urban planning tools, and specifically in this research, the PRC. This association is carried out through an assimilation process between the indicators of the BCN and those emanated from the SEA process, part of the PRC development, targeting the search of biophilic elements present in the set of BCN indicators within the SEA indicators. Thus, we extend this literature by combining the use of SEA with biophilic urbanism, to influence urban planning regarding the inclusion of biophilic elements, emphasizing contact with nature in cities.
The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. The second section gives an overview of the SEA process and the PRC. Section three describes the BCN indicators, the survey data, and the methodological framework. Section four presents the results of the content analysis of SEA reports and local governments' perceptions. The fifth section discusses our findings regarding how a SEA arises as a contributor towards the inclusion of the biophilic approach into local governments' urban planning. We conclude the paper with an overview of the main findings and potential contributions from SEA towards an extensive implementation of biophilic urbanism.
Section snippets
Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA) and Municipal Regulatory Plans (PRC): an overview
There are two complementary elements to the potential implementation of biophilic urbanism. First, there is the PRC, the Chilean primary land-use planning tool at the city level. Second, decision-making processes such as PRC must carry out a SEA process to guarantee the integration of environmental considerations into the process.
SEA attempts to integrate environmental considerations at the highest levels of decision-making (Fischer and González, 2021; Partidário, 2012) for different planning
Study area
Chile is a unitary state with about 17,5 million inhabitants in 2017. Its urban population amounts to 88% of the total (National Institute of Statistics [INE], 2018; World Bank Group [WBG], 2020). The country is composed of 345 municipalities that function as the tier of local government. In 2017, the 191 most populous cities, distributed among 215 local governments, covered 83% of the national population (Henríquez et al., 2020). The national average of urban green spaces was only 4,15 m2 per
Results
The content analysis conducted for the 135 SEA reports revealed that 36 did not include any of the biophilic elements listed in Table 1 within either monitoring or redesign indicators. The remaining 99 were linked to 91 local governments since some had more than one SEA process. From these reports, we identified 286 indicators from a total of 1006, explicitly referring to terms associated with biophilic elements, shown in Table 1. Concerning the presence of the main categories of biophilic
Discussion
This paper contributed to the public policy perspective from a methodological angle, being its main strength, by showing to what extent both approaches can complement each other. We presented the analysis of the Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA), part of the Communal Regulatory Plans (PRCs), as a potential contributor for including biophilic elements in the urban planning process at the local government level through its monitoring and redesign indicators. The foregoing, because through
Conclusions
Urban planning that incorporates natural habitats and urban green spaces is nowadays considered a critical issue due to challenges linked to urban systems, highlighted by the latest crises such as covid-19 and the effects of climate change. Accordingly, associations among biophilic urbanism and the Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA) emerge as solutions that might increase the adoption of environmental considerations into urban planning. On the one hand, the implementation of biophilic
Funding
This research was supported by the FONDECYT Regular Project No. 1180268, ANID/Chile.
Declaration of Competing Interest
none.
Acknowledgments
We gratefully acknowledge Prof. Dr. Ben Derudder for the constructive comments and feedback that guided this research. Besides, we gratefully acknowledge the “Biophilic Cities Network” administration for providing information about biophilic indicators pursued by some biophilic cities, and each local government that answered our survey.
Virginia Carter, Ph.D.; student at Ghent University. MSc in Environmental Studies. Geographer from Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile (PUC). Her main research interests focus on incorporating biophilic urbanism into Chilean territorial and urban planning plans and policies. She has experience applying the Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA) procedure, being the reviewer of the SEA procedure followed by the Chilean Energy Policy until 2050. She is currently part of the consulting team
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Virginia Carter, Ph.D.; student at Ghent University. MSc in Environmental Studies. Geographer from Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile (PUC). Her main research interests focus on incorporating biophilic urbanism into Chilean territorial and urban planning plans and policies. She has experience applying the Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA) procedure, being the reviewer of the SEA procedure followed by the Chilean Energy Policy until 2050. She is currently part of the consulting team undertaking the First Electricity Transmission Line study applying SEA. In addition, she has extensive experience in coordinating fog harvesting projects as the Field Project Coordinator at the NGO FogQuest: sustainable and water solutions.
Dr. Cristián Henríquez; in Environmental Sciences. Associate Professor at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile (PUC). His main research interests are urban sustainability and spatial analysis of land-use change with geomatics techniques. He is an Associate Researcher at the Center for Sustainable Urban Development (CEDEUS), member of the Center for Global Change (PUC), Center for Local Development (PUC), and Environmental Advisory Group (GAMA PUC). He has been an advisor for several studies and projects related to urban planning, climate adaptation, environmental assessment, and vulnerability to natural disasters.; in Environmental Sciences. Associate Professor at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile (PUC). His main research interests are urban sustainability and spatial analysis of land-use change with geomatics techniques. He is an Associate Researcher at the Center for Sustainable Urban Development (CEDEUS), member of the Center for Global Change (PUC), Center for Local Development (PUC), and Environmental Advisory Group (GAMA PUC). He has been an advisor for several studies and projects related to urban planning, climate adaptation, environmental assessment, and vulnerability to natural disasters.