Integrating Community Needs into Blue-Green Infrastructure Planning: A Stakeholder-Driven Co-Design Framework

Blue-Green Infrastructure (BGI) is a systematically interconnected network of natural and semi-natural spaces. By integrating blue hydrological systems—such as rivers, wetlands, and retention ponds—with green vegetation ecosystems including urban parks, green corridors, and green roofs, BGI delivers multifunctional ecosystem services and represents a core paradigm of nature-based solutions. Leading international practices, such as Singapore’s Active, Beautiful, Clean Waters Programme and Denmark’s Copenhagen Sankt Kjelds Square climate adaptation project, have demonstrated that BGI plays a critical role in enhancing urban resilience, mitigating climate change impacts, improving human well-being, and supporting sustainable urban development. However, traditional BGI planning has long relied on a top-down, technocratic and administrative management paradigm. This approach frequently overlooks localized community needs and everyday lived experiences, giving rise to environmental injustices such as misallocated ecological resources, spatial marginalization, and green gentrification. To address these challenges, this study aims to clarify how public preferences can be effectively translated into hard planning constraints, while investigating whether and how a stakeholder-driven co-design approach can mitigate land-use conflicts and enhance spatial equity in high-density urban renewal contexts. Grounded in spatial justice and social–ecological systems (SES) theory, this study develops an institutionalized BGI co-design theoretical framework consisting of four sequential stages: stakeholder mapping, demand translation, conflict negotiation, and adaptive governance. Furthermore, a functional mapping mechanism is established to convert qualitative community demands into operational planning parameters. Based on qualitative text analysis of a high-density urban renewal case study, this research empirically validates the efficacy and applicability of the proposed framework. The findings indicate that embedding the diverse demands of non-dominant stakeholders and vulnerable groups into planning constraints significantly improves the spatial accessibility, equity, and inclusiveness of BGI, while strengthening urban governance resilience to future uncertainties. This research provides novel theoretical insights and actionable policy implications for optimizing spatial governance and advancing equitable BGI planning in high-density cities.