At the last meeting of the Green Infrastructure Partnership, hosted by the Town and Country Planning Association, a new, searchable database was unveiled – named GIRL, the Green Infrastructure Resource Library. This powerful tool, which has been developed by Dr Ingo Schuder of the Centre of Ecology and Hydrology, Lancaster, will be hosted on the Green Infrastructure Partnership site. This unique database is freely accessible and is the result of years of painstaking work to collate and categorise the plethora of research related to the benefits of green infrastructure.
What excited us about this new resource was that it was not limited to the purely academic journal articles. It includes links to YouTube videos, webinars, podcasts, television clips and guidance produced by public and private sector organisations and will be regularly updated to ensure that we don’t miss the latest and greatest GI related output from a variety of sources.
Green Infrastructure (GI) became a known policy term over 10 years ago. The North West GI guide (2008) is a classic and still worth a read if you want to develop a GI strategy. At the time good documents on GI were rare. That has changed. GI is now embedded in national planning policy (NPPF, 2012). Projects, documents, case studies and websites on GI have exploded in number.
For Local Authorities, there are some excellent SPGs and Local Plans with GI related content that are already uploaded. GreenBlue Urban are delighted to contribute new and innovative content; links to important case studies, future webinars and PowerPoint presentations.
Dr Ingo Schüder, Director Brillianto states: “I started collating sources of GI information for colleagues and stakeholders about 8 years ago. In 2014 I started publishing it as the Green Infrastructure Resource Library (GIRL) as a pdf”.
“I spend 30 minutes on twitter a day and subscribe to several newsletters. I still miss stuff. There is so much information out there. So I was very pleased to team up with the Green Infrastructure Partnership. We converted the pdf into a fully searchable database. I trust this will help people to find what they are looking for. Watch this space for information on how to add your items to GIRL. GIRL is bound to grow!”
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When GreenBlue Urban spoke to Ingo he was positively brimming with excitement to have established a platform where we can all contribute, share and expand our knowledge to increase the power of the arguments we are all making every day to key stakeholders – that green infrastructure does benefit us all. The sheer amount of research shows … the truth is out there!
