The city as nature and the nature of the city - climate adaptation using living infrastructure: governance and integration challenges

The successful twenty-first-century cities are likely to be based on new visions and new imaginings of the city as nature and the nature of the city. Water is an integral part of our cities’ evolution with understanding of its values and relationships changing along with the technologies and governance regimes used for managing it. Green or living infrastructure is emerging as a paradigm based on integrating ecological elements to enhance cities and their adaptive capacity. Water is involved in almost all living infrastructure due to its ubiquitous nature and centrality in urban and living systems, for example, in the cooling nature of urban trees. This paper summarises the key water-related findings of the Canberra Urban and Regional Futures project on living infrastructure. The wider application of living infrastructure could generate multiple social and environmental benefits but these are constrained by substantive integration and governance challenges within the intrinsically politicalised processes shaping cities. © 2017 Engineers Australia.