“Valladolid’s Sustainable Urban Development Strategy, INNOLID 2020+, emerged as a response to the challenges faced by the city in tackling problems detected. Five major challenges have been identified that are organised into demographic, social, economic, territorial, environmental and climatic categories.”
This is the first paragraph of the paper “The Urban GreenUP project in Valladolid: Applied urban re-naturalisation strategy” by Alicia Villazán and Rosa Huertas from the Innovation and Economic Development Agency of the Valladolid City Council. The document gives an overview of the renaturing strategy being implemented in the Spanish city as part of the URBAN GreenUP project and of the expected impacts. The paper is written in a non-technical, easy-to-understand language and consists of the following sections: i) Background in Valladolid; ii) Urban re-naturalisation as a means of finding the solution; iii) The European URBAN GreenUP project; iv) Planned urban re-naturalisation measures; v) Expected results.
The paper is part of the publication Renaturalización de la ciudad (Renaturing Cities) of the Diputación de Barcelona (Barcelona Regional Government), which is freely available in English, Spanish and Catalan. The goal of the publication is to offer guidelines and support to stakeholders in urban planning and management willing to apply naturalisation strategies. This is based on the consideration that green infrastructures and urban spaces can highly improve our cities and reduce pollution.
The publication is divided into four blocks: i) Theory, which presents motivations for renaturing cities and the related positive impacts on citizens and the environment; ii) Strategies, which presents cities that have voluntarily decided to launch a renaturing programme in the framework of global strategies and collaborations with other cities; iii) Actions, which describes three specific city projects making use of nature to turn into more sustainable spaces. This is the section including the paper on the work carried out by URBAN GreenUP in Valladolid. The two other projects are Green Ring in Gandia and the Green Spaces and Biodiversity Plans of Barcelona, both examples of a successful inclusion of political ideas into long-term planning; iv) Epilogue, which reports reflections on how agriculture could help make green cities a reality and on green spaces offered by vertical city planning.