Managing Urban Green Areas: The Benefits of Collaborative Governance for Green Spaces

Urbanisation has had an impact on people’s livelihoods, and on social infrastructures as well as on the consumption of resources. In the last century, we have witnessed many transformations at the urban scale that in many cases led to the commodification and enclosure of public areas and, especially, green areas. With the turn of the millennium and following the adoption of the UN Agenda 2030, the trend has been partially reverted and cities in Europe are becoming progressively greener, although the phenomenon do not always bring positive societal outcomes and it is not able to re-distribute benefits among community members, promoting unequal access to green areas. Instead, in many cases the so-called green gentrification phenomenon has been identified as a primary societal challenge connected with urban regeneration projects. Building on this, the paper aims to find an answer to the question of whether or not the governance model adopted for urban green areas influences how benefits connected with ecosystem services are perceived by stakeholders and re-distributed at the community level. Based on the gaps highlighted in the theoretical background and direct observation of Biblioteca degli Alberi Milano (BAM), a recently developed urban park in Milan, an analytical framework was developed and tested. The results allow us to identify innovative practices for the management of green areas capable of maximising ecosystem services’ benefits beyond the intervention area. This will support the adaptability, replicability, and scalability of these initiatives while providing effective tools for practitioners and planners when developing a collaborative management model for urban green areas.