From fallow to flourishing: Nbs ideas and implementation strategies For Belfast

Implementing nature-based solutions (NBS) in Belfast offers distinct challenges and<br/>opportunities shaped by the city’s unique post-industrial landscape and complex sociopolitical history. The city’s fractured urban form – marked by aging infrastructure, derelict land, and the remnants of industries such as shipbuilding. glassworks and linen production – create a patchwork of both obstacles and potential.<br/><br/>This presentation explores a series of NBS initiatives in Belfast that collectively<br/>demonstrate the spectrum of implementation strategies, from top-down planning to<br/>bottom-up co-creation. It examines how these approaches generate different kinds of<br/>social, ecological, and spatial outcomes, and how they reflect varying theories of change within the urban context.<br/><br/>Top-down approaches often emphasise large-scale strategic interventions – such as<br/>citywide urban agriculture systems, integrated food–water–energy networks and urban intensification of underused areas. These projects leverage institutional power, long-term planning and qualitative evaluation methods to explore systemic shifts in lifestyle, infrastructure and economy.<br/><br/>In contrast, bottom-up initiatives emerge through collaboration with local communities, focusing on co-design, participatory visioning and small-scale site activation. Projects such as the UPSURGE urban park foreground community agency, place-based knowledge and experimental design processes that challenge conventional procurement and governance models.<br/><br/>Together, these diverse cases illuminate how NBS can become vehicles for cultural<br/>regeneration, environmental repair and civic innovation. The paper argues that the<br/>interplay between bottom-up and top-down modes of implementation – and the role of design within both – is crucial to unlocking