PRINCIPLES OF GREEN INFRASTRUCTURE

PRINCIPLES OF GREEN INFRASTRUCTURE

Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary defines principle as: “a comprehensive and fundamental law, doctrine or assumption.”  The principles listed here for green infrastructure reflect some of the most common and comprehensive assumptions associated with these efforts.  Or, to stated another way: Would these statements work as the fundamental doctrine for green infrastructure?

Successful green infrastructure approaches emphasize community agreement on principles rather than fixed or predetermined standards.  One important principle, then, is that the community – whether local, state, regional, or national – is the appropriate level for making plans and decisions regarding green infrastructure at the same scale.  

While principles may differ for each green infrastructure project or effort, depending on the unique situation, they intend to encourage, not prescribe, performance-based actions and use. The following statements, adapted from the Green Infrastructure Tool Kit developed for the National Town Meeting in May 1999, reflect principles common to many ongoing green infrastructure projects around the country and the world:  

Green infrastructure:

• Describes and defines natural resource values and functions in a ``whole-system,'' place-based context that helps the community visualize and understand important ecological, cultural and economic linkages and relationships.

• Delivers public values, goods and services essential to meeting the community’s overall quality of life objectives.

• Develops at the community level so that all legitimate beneficial public and private uses are included, with the least adverse impact on economic, community, and environmental assets and objectives.

• Relies on voluntary approaches that respect the economic value of land, private property, and local home rule – rather than on regulatory approaches.

• Provides the community with regulatory predictability which increases its ability to protect resources and to foster development in appropriate places.

• Brings together non-traditional and broad-based alliances for planning, funding, management and monitoring.