The Going Green plan, which has been developed in partnership with Birmingham city centre's Business Improvement Districts (BIDs), takes a strategic approach to greening the city to ensure maximum benefits for residents and businesses including improved air quality, better health and wellbeing and engaging streetscapes.
A 'toolkit' of interventions enables local decision makers to make informed choices about implementing green infrastructure across the city. These scale financially and across ambition from enhancing existing green infrastructure such as planters, to installing wildlife ponds, living lamp posts and city scale parks.
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Danny Crump, Director of Urbanism at Broadway Malyan, said: "Often we see reports with fantastic recommendations, but which don’t consider the real-life challenges, such as securing funding or planning permission. We wanted the proposals in our masterplan to be as deliverable as possible.
"Birmingham is one of many urban centres across the globe facing huge challenges. The slow Covid-19 recovery still depletes highstreets and city centre life. The impact of the climate crisis is more and more visible, as is the world-wide loss of biodiversity. As urban designers, of huge importance to us is how city centres affect not just people's health and wellbeing, but their safety and quality of life. If we truly want to have an impact on these shared issues, we can no longer afford to provide blue-sky thinking. We must come up with a clear roadmap for change.
"Creating a Green Infrastructure Masterplan for the City Core provides the unique opportunity to demonstrate the benefits of GI in addressing global challenges, and to reinstate the status of the city centre as a driver of commercial, creative, scientific, political and cultural life that influences way beyond its borders."
