What Really Matters in Green Infrastructure for the Urban Quality of Life? Santiago de Chile as a Showcase City

The built, green and social environment express the situation of a city and, to a large extent, indicate the development of the urban area. These components of the urban environment have a strong impact on the quality of life of citizens. Along with the concepts of resource efficiency and resilience in cities, the quality of life forms one of the three pillars on which our research on urban transformations is grounded. We approach the concept of quality of life from the environmental perspective and understand the human well-being as an integral part of the broader concept of quality of life. In this study we focus on green infrastructure (GI) as an indication for quality of life research. Here, we measure the extent to which people can access GI as a service and profit from this infrastructure for health-related and social dimensions (Scottish Executive 2005; Bognar 2005). Rapid urbanisation processes accelerate land-use changes that mostly go along with extensive urban land consumption and involve population developments. Such multi-dimensional changes in urban land use and land-consumption patterns are very dynamic and widely ramified. They can evoke unsustainable structures that entangle social-spatial differentiations which are discussed in the context of urban growth and shrinkage processes (see Haase et al. in this volume, dealing with urban dynamics, Seto et al. 2011; Kabisch and Kuhlicke 2014). As land is a limited and contested resource, it demands for infrastructural provision and, particularly with respect to urban quality of life and a sustainable urban development, for the provision of green infrastructure.