ABSTRACT
Chapter 3 by Rumble and Brown explores the opportunities and constraints to progressing innovative urban nature-based food-water-energy nexus solutions. The chapter summaries the strong case for urban greening. While there is no shortage of studies extolling the multifaceted benefits of urban greening, progress remains slow. Rumble and Brown identify the most common explanations behind the sluggish uptake before presenting a case study of exploring urban greening snakes and ladders in Southend-on-Sea, UK. Rumble and Brown undertook key informant interviews with expert practitioners in order to contextualise the findings from Southend-on-Sea and advance both academic and practitioner understanding by drawing upon experiences in other cities in the UK, Netherlands, and Germany. The key findings include the importance of funding and dedicated maintenance budgets; risk of failure, silos, and a lack of cross-departmental communication; and the importance of greening champions as well as the level of interest amongst staff within city administrations. Opportunities to promote greening came from examples from Eindhoven (Netherlands), where city planners commenced greening incrementally, what Rumble and Brown term ‘greening by stealth’, and had external mediators to arbitrate between the local authority and affected parties to ameliorate concerns and overcome the barrier that a vocal minority may present to urban greening.
