Greening the urban edge towards climate neutrality and resilience. The metropolitan area of Barcelona participation in the Horizon Commit2Green project.

This paper discusses the strategic contribution of managing and planning urban forest edges to resilience. In order to do that, it focuses on the Horizon Commit2Green [C2G] project and the pilot in the metropolitan area of Barcelona [AMB]. AMB covers an area of 636km2 that encompasses 36 municipalities with 3.35 million inhabitants. Despite this high density, only 48% of the area corresponds to developed land. Forests and other blue and green open spaces occupy the other 52%. The contact and interaction between these two coexisting realities post many challenges and opportunities. C2G supports 8 cities to move away for a project-by-project NBS intervention approach towards the development of greening and renaturing strategies towards climate neutrality and resilience that are cross-scalar and participatory, inform existing development agendas and policies, and are implemented through pilots that create tangible impact on the ground of the local communities and broader ecosystem. This paradigm shift is founded on the operationalization of Ecosystem Services [ES] in city decision-making at the district and city scale. The pilot in the AMB is located at the urban edge between a low-income residential and industrial district and a forest area with several minor streams. The pilot aims at identifying and testing innovative NBS for managing the edge through co-design processes with the local communities and a nearby school. The identified challenges are: (1) lack of public space, (2) intense heat stress, (3) a negative landscape image of abandonment, with continuously and uncontrolled dumps and improper uses, and (4) the alteration of hydrological fluxes, with the development of extensive grey drainage infrastructure with limited infiltration, increased runoff and depleted water tables results. The learnings of managing this fringe area will be used as a case study for replication in similar sites, improving policy and testing new urban planning approaches.