LivableCities

In LivableCities, 6 NWE cities and 7 partners from science, practice, education and civil society join forces to tackle common territorial challenges caused by unsustainable urban development: biodiversity loss, air pollution and climate vulnerability. High levels of surface sealing (e.g., SLS: 48.2% (SDG Portal 2025), ANT: 64% (Huyghe et al. 2021)) have reduced green spaces, impaired soil functions and caused habitat loss, intensifying urban heat islands (e.g., ANT: +9°C summer evenings (EEA 2020)), limiting rainwater infiltration and reducing air quality: In 2022/23, no NWE-city had 'good' air quality; LivableCities cities rank ‘fair’ to ‘moderate’ (EEA 2025). 

To counter this, blue-green infrastructure (BGI) is implemented in NWE cities, but little focus is placed on (re)greening ‘challenging spaces’: sealed by past unsustainable planning, degraded by neglect and biodiversity loss, or limited by land-use conflicts (e.g. mobility infrastructures, green deserts, narrow streets).

This is where LivableCities comes in: It focuses on creating, expanding and strategically connecting BGI across spatial levels (macro, meso, micro) with a focus on challenging spaces. The overall objective of LivableCities is to increase BGI by “re-greening” challenging spaces in 6 cities across NWE and to (re)connect them to BGI networks to restore biodiversity, improve air quality and enhance climate resilience. Bridging policy, planning, practice and capacity development, LivableCities delivers a Joint BGI Strategy, a Joint Action Planning Framework, 3 practical Solutions for different spatial levels and targeted training schemes. 

The pilot cities co-develop (and apply) 1 Joint BGI-Strategy defining common goals for the increase of BGI at all levels and an Action Planning Framework providing implementation instruments across all spatial levels. They jointly develop 3 Pilot Actions for the three spatial levels, creating city-wide blue-green networks (CCiC, LAN, VDS), blue-green spaces and streets (ANT, CCiC, LAN, UTR) and microhabitats (VDS, SLS), assess their effects on biodiversity, air quality and climate resilience and produce 3 Solutions: a BGI Planning Approach for the connection of BGI networks across scales (“nexus”), an Intervention Toolkit for neighourhood-level BGI (“patches”) and a Manual for modular BGI Typologies (“plug-ins”) in challenging spaces. LivableCities delivers Joint Training Schemes to increase institutional capacity (for academia, administrations, planners, decision-makers, professionals, citizens and civil society etc.) to plan, implement and maintain BGI. All partners collaborate transnationally, bringing in expertise on BGI, policy and planning (cities), training (Afpa, SFP), biodiversity (P&C, UGENT), urban design and air quality (RPTU), climate adaptation (IZES) and communication (BUILDERS). Cooperation is realised through Planning Labs, an expert team co-developing Pilot Actions and Solutions and Joint Training Schemes.