Abstract
Urban protected areas offer evident benefits for urban biodiversity, residents, economies and public administration. These benefits are related to the management practices, which have to consider challenges and stakeholder’s interests. This chapter aims to demonstrate the utility of participatory planning instruments in obtaining a consensus between stakeholders for urban protected area management. We tested different participatory planning methods in Văcărești Nature Park (VNP), located in Bucharest, Romania. We used a social survey, an online GIS platform and role-playing workshops. Our results show that participatory planning can bring up many advantages for urban protected areas. The spatial knowledge of local people concerning threats and problems, the position of different stakeholders, and the mapping of species or ecosystem services are only a few of them. We found out that only 45.6% of the residents living in the VNP neighborhood visit the location frequently, VNP being completely unattractive for children. The limited attractivity is related to low security, non-aesthetic landscapes and limited amenities. In terms of management practices, we found a gap between what people expect from VNP, what public decision-makers want it to be and what the real state of facts is. Hence, participatory planning should be considered in urban management.
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Ioja, C. et al. (2023). Bridging the People–Nature Divide Using the Participatory Planning of Urban Protected Areas . In: Breuste, J., Artmann, M., Ioja, C., Qureshi, S. (eds) Making Green Cities. Cities and Nature. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73089-5_21
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