Disentangling the connections: A network analysis of approaches to urban green infrastructure

During the last two decades, a mounting body of research has emerged on the value, use and overall importance of urban green infrastructure. From the contribution to human well-being and sustainable development, urban green infrastructure is positioned as a relevant concept within ecosystem services and nature-based solutions. Our research objective is to identify the main scientific approaches to urban green infrastructure, while accounting for different comparative criteria, such as subject of analysis, methods used, location or scale. We used an analysis of scientific literature in order to identify trends on urban green infrastructure research. We designed a study consisting of peer-reviewed articles and conference proceedings, published between 2005 and 2017 and listed in Science Direct database. We identified 497 peer-reviewed articles and conference proceedings, of which we validated 490 papers that included keywords. We used network analysis to identify significant patterns on the keywords co-occurrence in the scientific literature. Our main results identified the most used, powerful and influential keywords, while comparing the European network with the rest of the world. We found that terms such as: green infrastructure, ecosystem services and urban forestry are among the most used keywords in the ongoing body of literature. Our study tries to better understand the directions used so far to analyse urban green infrastructure and the differences that occur between areas or scale of analysis. Main findings suggested by our results could anticipate shortcomings or future research, while better establishing the importance of urban green infrastructure as a nature-based solution.