Building Socio-Ecological Resilience through Urban Green, Blue and White Space

This project is an initiative to integrate open urban space into urban planning and social fabric aiming to advance truly resilient and sustainable Arctic cities. More than 80% of the Arctic population is living in 110 cities. The cities have substantially warmer climate making them unique laboratory to observe "future" environmental changes. Open space converts a settlement to allocation with sense of-place and values. Green (vegetated)and blue (water) spaces, being the are as of public attraction, recreation and eco-services, make cities liveable. Novelty of the project is that it recognizes distinct role white space, which covers the Arctic for 8-9 months a year. We consider green, blue and white space along with built-up areas as components of an interconnected socio-environmental (urban) ecosystem. Knowledge on open space in urban resilience is extremely limited. The Arctic cities were and largely still are the outposts isolated from harsh climate and fragile northern nature. Such attitudes must be changed if resilience issues are seriously addressed. The project's objective is to collect new data and knowledge, to gain skills and expertise, to exchange this knowledge with local communities, integrate diverse data using innovative data fusion technology and to create holistic understanding of urban open space in the Arctic cities.