The city of Barcelona has an entire strategy dedicated to taking care of its trees, called the Tree Masterplan. To create this Masterplan, the city talked to over 700 different people – from gardeners to urban planners and from restaurant owners to street cleaners – to understand their needs, viewpoints and opinions on this topic. In the Swedish city of Malmö, the Municipal Housing Company has gone a step further and is actively engaging everyone from local residents to utility companies to design and implement blue and green features in its neighbourhoods.

In this episode of the Creating Green Cities podcast, we talk about the governance of urban nature-based solutions. While there is no 'one size fits all' approach to governance, there is strong evidence supporting the added value of involving various actors in collaborative approaches when implementing and managing nature-based solutions. The episode features interviews with Gabino Carballo from the team behind Municipality of Barcelona's "Tree Master Plan", Tanja Hasselmark Mason and Mikaela Gomez from the Swedish Green Roof Institute in Malmö and Logan Strenchock, Environmental and Sustainability Officer at the Central European University in Budapest. Our podcast guests discuss the keys to success in creating and managing initiatives related to urban nature and why it is worth it to engage many different people in the process.

The Creating Green Cities podcast has been created as part of the NATURVATION project and explores urban nature-based solutions across Europe through stories of inspiring innovators who use their passion and creativity to make cities green. The focus of the podcast is on initiatives that bring more nature to the city or enhance existing green urban areas such as parks, vegetation along streets or rivers, green roofs or gardens to deliver multiple benefits to the local population. Five episodes explore different aspects of urban-nature based solutions, such as innovation, business models and financing as well as assessment, monitoring and governance. Interview guests from Barcelona, Budapest, Malmö and Utrecht provide practical insights from their experiences of designing, implementing and maintaining urban nature-based solutions across Europe.

New episodes will be released every two weeks and can be accessed directly below or streamed on popular podcast platforms, such as Spotify, Deezer and Apple Podcasts. The podcast forms part of NATURVATION's free open online 'Urban Nature' course, available on the Coursera platform.

This project has been funded by the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 730243.