Escuela de Politécnica Superior

Providing conditions for health and well-being, especially for those most exposed to social and environmental inequalities, is a precondition for sustainable development. Green infrastructures in peri-urban areas have the potential to improve the quality of life of locals by fostering healthy practices, providing views, or bringing nature closer to the city. This work explores the local perception of well-being within urban green infrastructures (UGI) in the peri-urban fringe of Madrid (Spain) through a combination of qualitative methods: “go-alongs” and “semi-structured static interviews”. The grounded-theory based codification of the data using NVivo software and their subsequent analysis results in the identification of social, natural, and perceptual elements that prove to play a relevant role in locals’ perception of well-being. Among these, connectivity with other green spaces, panoramic views and place-based memories are aspects that seem to make UGI serve the community at its full potential, including perceived physical and psychological well-being. We identify in each case study both positive characteristics of UGI and dysfunctional aspects and areas of opportunity. Lastly, a methodological, geographical, and theoretical discussion is made on the relevance of the case studies and pertinence of the two interview methods as valuable tools for analysis and intervention in the peri-urban landscape.

This paper presents an exploration of the thresholds of the city, embodying the concept of Urban Green Infrastructure. In particular, it is a journey through the urban fringe of Madrid, where these green infrastructures, due to their form and history, achieve the sense of urban threshold and act as identity generators of the city. We examine the concept of peri-urban landscape in relation to nowadays challenges of sustainable development, as well as the benefits of Urban Green Infrastructures in the contour of the city. We then take a brief tour though the peripheral landscape of the city of Madrid, where we analyse metropolitan parks and historical green areas that comply its proximity image. After identifying the green infrastructures acting as thresholds in the city of Madrid, we focus on the south-east diagonal of the capital in order to reaffirm its importance in the construction of the image and identity of the city. We defend the importance of Urban Green Infrastructure to and from the city, suggesting the necessity of a supra-municipal planning tool to take change of the peri-urban landscape, usually perceived as subsidiary, to deem the proximity visions of the city as relevant for its design.

The complexity of the study of landscape and urban green infrastructure, and the perceptual aspects required to characterize them, calls for a qualitative analysis. To-gether with a series of case studies details and nuances arise when analyzing what the liter-ature has called the "non-expert" view of the landscape. The study of urban green infra-structure, specifically its perception, is carried out using a qualitative methodology, with an analysis based on NVIVO software. We coded a series of semi-structured interviews conducted in metropolitan parks on the city-center fringe. The coding process, although not linear, is increasingly selective and specific, starting with an open coding (general, of all the interviews), followed by an axial coding, and finishing with a selective coding, so that a correlation is created between the most referenced concepts throughout the interviews (called "nodes"). The main objective of the proposed methodological analysis is to shed light on the perception of the elements that are part of the green infrastructure network of the Madrid metropolitan area. The following nomenclature was used to refer to de views on the landscape: "technical" (or trained) and "everyday" (or day-to-day) to refer to the views of the landscape. In the light of the results obtained from the qualitative analysis of the interviews, we can see how a relatively small sample can yield significant conclusions regarding both the methodology itself and issues intrinsically linked to landscape such as place attachment, sense of belonging, relationship with the surroundings or image of the city. Results were also obtained in relation to the urban green infrastructure itself, such as levels and relevance of connectivity, multifunctionality and accessibility.