The Nature Based Solutions framework as a tool to assess the benefits and co-benefits of the modernist housing estates in Bałuty, Lodz, Poland

Abstract

The European Union has been promoting the concept of Nature Based Solutions (NBS) as a  tool that enables a comprehensive assessment of the benefits and co-benefits of green infrastructure in cities (Raymond et al., 2017). This topic is of particular interest in the context of areas that, during the period of post-war reconstruction, were transformed from urban and suburban, relatively densely built 19th-century urban fabric into housing estates built according to modernist principles (Hanzl, 2022). The latter led to an utterly different organisation of space and introduced ample green spaces between buildings and on the outskirts of newly constructed super-blocks. The housing norms imposed the inclusion of green areas as a protection against pollution from urban traffic. The organisation of open spaces, often partially haphazard, stemmed from the overlap of previous urban fabric, including the formerly existing street system, and the new concepts and rules of modernist fabric.
In the current paper, we look closely at the role and forms of open space and green infrastructure for the local residents of the housing estates Zgierska-Stafana and Inflancka in Bałuty, Łódź. We apply the frameworks for the analysis based on earlier methodologies developed by Raymond et al. (2017), Kabisch et al.(2016), and Keestra et al.(2018) to understand how the modernist approaches comply with contemporary urban planning and societal goals. These tasks are of utmost importance because over one-third of citizens of Lodz and other Polish major cities live in modernist structures. In the case of analysed estates, an additional component is the role of former, fragmented, 19th-century structures, which we perceive as a chance to retrofit the transformed areas. Our goal is to propose guidance on how to transform the modernist urban fabric into more contemporary city structures without losing the opportunities of NBS.