Know the project
The ” Verd de proximitat BCN ” project has received the support of Barcelona City Council and the “la Caixa” Foundation as part of the Barcelona Science Plan 2020-2023
The main objective of the “Green of proximity BCN” project is to design and implement a “Monitoring and evaluation plan for the operation and impact of green roofs and façades in the city of Barcelona”, which is inclusive and participatory. economically viable and sustainable over time. To this purpose, a consortium has been set up that integrates members of the scientific community, the business world and social integration, who together with the owners and users of these nature-based solutions will co-design and co-implement the retrospective monitoring of 4 ongoing projects in order to evaluate their operation and the real impact of these constructive solutions on previously selected key indicators.
In order to put the results and data collected at the service of all citizens, a methodology for sharing and connect with existing digital platforms at city level will be designed and implemented. Using the results obtained from the monitoring and evaluation phase of real cases, the proposal for the future “Monitoring and evaluation plan for the operation and impact of green roofs and façades” will be drafted to be applied in future projects during the design of these solutions (prospective monitoring). Monitoring and evaluation of green roofs and facades will be essential in the future, not only for measuring the success of individual projects but also for the use of this information to evaluate their efficiency and cost-effectiveness for replication and subsequent scaling, as well as for urban planning and management and strategic decision-making at the city level.
The “Green of proximity BCN” project will allow the City of Barcelona to be a pioneer at both European and International level in the establishment of plans for monitoring and evaluation of local urban green space.
Project objectives
The general objective of the “Green of proximity BCN” project is to design and implement a plan for monitoring and evaluating the operation and impact of the integration of vegetation on the building’s envelope, specifically green roofs, walls and façades, for the city of Barcelona, which will be inclusive and participatory, economically viable and sustainable over time.
In order to ensure the model designed to be relevant and useful to immediate end-users, providing at the same time the information needed for future urban planning processes, the plan shall consider the following fundamental principles: a) be scientifically robust; b) be practical and direct; c) baseline assessment must be clearly defined; d) be aligned with municipal policies; e) be based on a transdisciplinary approach.
In order to achieve this general objective, the following specific objectives are considered:
- Recognition of stakeholders
- Review and critical analysis of existing projects
- “Retrospective” monitoring of existing projects and evaluation of their current operation and impact
- Selection of pilot projects
- Critical selection of the indicators that are best suited to assess the impact (cause-effect)
- Design and implementation of monitoring in existing projects
- Design and implementation of data sharing methodology and connectivity with digital platforms
- Impact assessment (success / effectiveness)
- Design and drafting of the “Monitoring and evaluation plan for the operation and impact of green roofs and façades in the city of Barcelona”
- Dissemination of results and proposals for future application to municipal policies ("prospective monitoring")
The project “Green of proximity BCN”, although it is framed in the topic of “Sustainable city: new technologies applied to housing, space and public services”, also contributes in a transversal way to the research and the innovation around the urban challenges of Barcelona as a city and urban conurbation, to the improvement of the quality of life, especially of citizens with low mobility (such as the elderly, or groups with disabilities) with limited access to traditional green areas, as well as to the environmental protection.
The “Green of proximity BCN” project will contribute to the modernization of the city of Barcelona within the framework of the objectives for sustainable development (SDGs), at the same time as incorporating technological transformation as a close tool in the attention to the citizenry, and will encourage citizen participation in planned research activities.
