Leveraging Greenspace to Manage Urban Flooding: An Investigation of Nature-Based Solutions Implementation in U.S. Public Parks

Jiayang Li () and Ziyi Guo
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Jiayang Li: Department of Landscape Architecture, Florida Institute for Built Environment Resilience, College of Design, Construction, and Planning, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL 32601, USA
Ziyi Guo: Department of Urban and Regional Planning, College of Design, Construction, and Planning, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL 32601, USA

Land, 2024, vol. 13, issue 9, 1-22

Abstract: Many cities are looking to adopt nature-based solutions (NBS) in greenspace to manage urban flooding and provide diverse co-benefits. Yet little research exists to inform the planning and design of park NBS. This study investigated NBS adoption in 58 public parks across major U.S. cities, using a 2022 survey by the Trust for Public Lands and other secondary datasets. We developed a typology to conceptualize a wide range of park NBS into five high-level categories by size/capacity, location of the gray–green spectrum, and design objectives. We then employed this typology to explore how a park’s adopted NBS types may relate to its landscape and sociodemographic contexts. We found that the most used type of NBS in the studied parks was ECO (a typology we defined as conserving, restoring, or creating ecosystems to mitigate flooding through ecological processes and functions), while the least used NBS type was ENG (a typology we defined as imitating natural infiltration processes but having no living elements). Further, parks that adopted ECO had significantly higher percentages of greenspace in the surrounding, as well as higher flood risks. We also found notable—though not statistically significant—evidence of potential associations between the type of NBS implementation in a park and its nearby neighborhoods’ income level, poverty, and population racial and age compositions. Moreover, our findings indicated that park visitors were more privileged compared to residents living near a park. We concluded that park contextual factors deserve more explicit consideration in the planning and design of NBS and discussed key implications of this study for practice and future research around park NBS for urban flooding.

Keywords: stormwater management; green stormwater infrastructure; parks; landscape architecture; landscape design and planning; urban greenspace; park equity; living shorelines; stream restoration (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q15 Q2 Q24 Q28 Q5 R14 R52 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jlands:v:13:y:2024:i:9:p:1531-:d:1482694

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