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:: Methods + Tools
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Where did the concept of Green Infrastructure come from? Green infrastructure planning is not an entirely new concept. While grey infrastructure involves the built environment – roads, pipelines, and power lines -- green infrastructure includes the natural assets. Green infrastructure evolved from fields such as landscape architecture, ecology, conservation biology and planning. In the late 1800s, Frederick Law Olmsted, the father of the modern landscape architecture movement, sought to connect park systems throughout urban areas such as his famous “Emerald Necklace” in Boston that links parks and green spaces. In 1969, Ian McHarg set forth his idea of overlaying multiple sources of information, such as drainage areas and soils, as layers on the landscape in order to understand limitations and opportunities for conservation and development in his book Design with Nature. This work forms the conceptual basis for geographic information systems or GIS, in which digital maps are overlaid to show spatial relationships. In the 1970s, landscape ecologist R.T.T. Forman contributed ideas of landscape mosaics or habitat cores and patches and the need to connect these areas to ensure that areas are large enough for populations to be sustainable in his book Land Mosaics: The Ecology of Landscapes and Regions. See the resources section for references to these authors. |