Access to adequate environmental amenities is fundamental for the sustainability, resilience and quality of human life in cities.
> this requires a better understanding of ecological patterns and social cultural processes in the places most people call home.
As more people will live in cities than in rural environments this means that the daily interaction with nature for most people will come from their everyday urban places. As ESS of green infrastructure are still not well recognised in Austrian municipal councils, we initiated a place based approach to the perception of green infrastructure and climate change in Laa an der Thaya.
Ecosystem Services are ecological processes or functions that provide benefits to
human society.
Urban Green Infrastructure is an interconnected matrix of vegetation, soil and
water that conserves ecosystem values, functions and services.
Cultural services are regarded as the ‘environmental settings, locations or
situations that give rise to changes in the physical or mental states of people, and
whose character are fundamentally dependent on living processes’. Over
millennia these environmental settings have been co-produced by the constant
interactions between humans and nature.
Integrated Approach of Cultural ESS of Urban Green Infrastructure
- important to assess local knowledge and placebased values in conjunction with biophysical parameters
- humans with their cultural diversity are an integral ecosystem component – services are indispensable to the quality of urban life.
> How to integrate cultural ecosystem services into decision making and planning processes!
> How to investigate different societal concepts of world views, meanings and attachment to place and include values associated with place!
