GI case study:

Urban garden El Caminito

Sara Lamarti Elvira

For the FutureLearn Course Shaping a Sustainable Future with Green

Infrastructure (Grenoble Ecole de Management), 2022
Your GI case study
Contents
Green infrastructure and ecosystem services.................................................................... 3
Policy ................................................................................................................................ 5
Governance ....................................................................................................................... 6
Economic aspects ............................................................................................................. 9
TIME FOR ACTION! ...................................................................................................... 9

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Green infrastructure and ecosystem services

 Describe your GI element: what is it made of? In what does it constitute

a GI element (or a potential one)?

My GI element is a communitary urban garden located in Malaga city, El Caminito. It is

an element of the GI because is natural, brings multiple ecosystem services1 and it is not
isolated. Nevertheless, its conectivity to other GI elements could be really improved.

 What ecosystems can you identify within your GI element? Please

describe them briefly. Remember to think about different scales

In my example, the urban garden, we have the hot beds, where the crops get sun, soil
elements and water (via drip irrigation) to grow and multiplicate. Then we (or one of
our numerous pests) eat them.

Other ecosystem would be he compost pile, where we bring food waste, pruning waste,
carton and water, and the insects and other microorganisms make it into hummus.

The little orchard in this urban garden and the trees of the park nearby can be another
ecosystem, as they shelter numerous ways of life.

As it can be constitued as part of the Green corridors of Malaga city, it could be part of
a greater ecosystem (with the Natural Park Mounts of Malaga, wich is included in the
Natura 2000 network).

 What ecosystem services are provided in your GI element? Please

present them based on the four ESS categories.

El Caminito urban garden, brings us a lot of Ecosystem Services, such as:

- Providing resources: fresh local food, clean wáter, timber, flowers.

- Regulating: Floods (very important in my town, where the rain comes as torrential
downpour), temperatures, disease regulation due to biodiversity.

- Supporting: the closing of cycles (nutrient cycle), generation of soil, polinization.

- Cultural: It is a place for "knitting" community through sharing time and activities
with the neighbours, practicing democratic decission making.

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Like temperature mitigation, flood regulation, prevention of landslides, provision of fresh food and
water, space for communitary activities, etc.

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  What are the benefits derived from these ecosystem services?

ESS 1: edible products >> Benefit: local and healthy food. Less pollution as the
transport of food is reduced.

ESS 2: biodiversity conservation >> Benefit: more resilient urban habitats before
plagues and diseases.

ESS 3: Flood regulation >> Benefit: reduced risk of floods, with all the economic and
social costs that saves. Also provides the acuifers with water.

ESS 4: Cleans air from greenhouse gases and other pollutant. >> Benefit: less
respiratory system diseases, climate change mitigation.

 How well connected is your GI element to others? Is it part of a

network? Where could connectivity be improved?

The urban garden El Caminito is next to a park. There's only a graveyard between them,
wich walls could easily become green. From there, we could grow more grasses, hedges
and trees to make a bridge to the park. From that park to the Guadalmedina river, witch
is 2-3 blocks away, we could do the same or make green rooftops or facades (vertical
gardens) in the buildings and gardens in the few abandoned plots there to connect them.
And from there, besides the river carries almost never water, it has a lot of vegetation in
it, so I think it's humidity is enough to mantain that ecosystem. The river bed goes to the
sea and also to the mountain around Malaga city. In it's way out of town, it passes by a
botanic garden (Jardin Botanico de la Concepcion) wich is already well connected to the
mountain and I think also to the river.

It would be great, and not very expensive, to do this.

Obstacules would be a more present on the other side of the urban garden, because the
other green patches are not so close to it (there ire roads and 4 or more blocks between
El Caminito and the mount Victoria or another urban garden named La Yuca. But it
would also be possible to connect them by tree rows, vertigal gardens and green
rooftops.

I think in order to be achievable it should be at a town level, so the different projects

now active and related to GI in my hometown would be able to work together. If we go
only neighbourhood level, we are very few people in each project, but if we go for the
city, we can work together and with the authorities to increase the place given to GI
proyects in the urban planning. And the connectivity between them as part of green
corridors and in connection with a green ring around the city.

We then could also improve growing links to other GI levels then we could go regional.

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 • What scale are you working at? Does your GI element fit into a network at
another scale you might not have considered in the previous question?

As I said, it could be connected (by the Guadalmedina river’s bed) to protected areas
like:

- The Natural Park Mounts of Malaga (4495 ha.), it's protected at a regional area
(Andalusia), wich is part of the european network Natura 2000.

- Coast ecosystem of the Mediterranean sea.

Policy
• Are there local, regional, or national policies which might have an impact
on this particular GI element? (e.g. if it is agricultural land, what are some
relevant laws, regional funding programmes… or if it is in an urban area,
what is the plan regulating its development...)

I think Spain, as part of the EU, is part of it's strategies on GI and on Biodiversity
https://ec.europa.eu/environment/nature/ecosystems/strategy/index_en.htm, but I'm not
sure if the actions that this strategies suggest are mandatory for the spanish government
through some kind of sanction or not.
In Spain we have, at a national level, the National Strategy for GI and ecologycal
connectivity and restoration (Estrategia Nacional de Infraestructura Verde y de la
Conectividad y Restauración ecológicas) valid since july 2021, wich speeks about
Urban Green Infraestructures too (IVU in spanish).

But in my region, Andalusia, the new spatial planning law (ley LISTA) says nothing
about GI or UGI. It's a shame because the urban pressure here, specially in the coastal
zones, is really high.

Here in Malaga, although the Urban Observatory of the Environment (Observatorio del
Medio Ambiente Urbano, OMAU) has very good and complete proposals for green
corridors and a green belt for the city (Agenda 2015, etc.), it's advices and reports seem
to be systematically ignored by the local government.

I really want to know what can we, the citizens, can do to make the GI strategies come
true.
At a european level, there are a lot of policies and strategies: European Green Deal, EU
Biodiversity Strategy 2030, EU Strategy on GI, Guidelines of the European Comission
about GI, etc. etc.

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Governance

 Include your work from Week 4, Activity 1, i.e. the template based on
the Tetrahedron Model) and provide a short analysis of the most
important aspects of your local governance arrangement.

Our local governance arrangement is conformed by

- The local public authority: Their discourse is for a sustainable Green city but their
rules of the game are closer to Business As Usual (mixed with Tecnutopism). They sell
a greenwashed facade of digital green city while continuing to spoil very important GI
initiatives as the Project for an Urban Forest in one of most densely populated
neighbourhoods of the city (Bosque Urbano Malaga), the Renaturalization of the
Guadalmedina River or the protection of the last not urbanized beach of Malaga
(Arraijanal). They have lots of resources (economical, media) and power, including
law knowledge and money to sell public grounds.

- The regional and state authorities can be a source of power to the local government or
sometimes also to Green infreaestructure projects, it depends on whether or not they are
from the same party as the local government. Sometimes seeking support from european
normatives and claims can help the activist groups to denounce local injustice.

- Allied associations and ONGs: even inside de ecological spectrum, different groups
have different discourses, but the common values are sustainability, social justice,
nature preservation and claims for climate change action. Usually they have little
power, unless they can reach and attract a lot of people. But they are resourcefull in the
way of passion, knowledge, human conexion and support, and technical habilities.
Rules of the game of this groups are usually decentralization and direct democracy,
even total rejection of monetary or jerachical elements, sometimes to an extreme that
can be counterproductive. I think we have to be more open to connect and negociate
with other stakeholders. And understand that the majority of people are too occupied
making a living to know or care about the environment, because the media are not fully
depicting the urgency of the climate, biodiversity and resource crisis.

- Local businesses (depending on the kind of business, its resources, power, discourse
and rules of the game will change).

- General public and institutions (like education centers, etc.) can connect with the
discourse and rules of the game of our GI element, and they can be resoucefull at skills
and knowledge levels, but they will have not so much power.

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  Include your work from Week 4, Activity 2, i.e. the stakeholder
influence vs. interest grid. Write a short analysis of how this might
impact your GI management.

 What timeframes are your stakeholders working with?

Local government: Timescale of 4 years (short term).

ONGs and environmental activists: Timescale of decades or more (long term)
Enterprises close to the GI element: timescale of 1 or 2 years (short term)

 What key data is already available to you? What data might you be
missing? Which organisation could you work with to develop it.
Maybe we could have experts to mesure the mitigation of heat, the absortion of rain
water or the biodiversity richness (of seeds, flora and fauna) from our urban garden. We
could take data from interviews to the neighbours and the closest schools, about the
activities, learning oportunities and wellbeing they find here.

Organisations could be OMAU, the University of Málaga.

• What is your GI element’s story? How could you use that narrative to
support more effective governance?

The history behind the ten years old kitchen community garden El Caminito in Malaga
is about 'creative rebelion" and team work. A group of neighbours from the city, tired of

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the lack of green public spaces, specially kitchen gardens, started restoring an
abandoned plot and cultivating it. That was the seed for this amazing place, where
friendships, learning, creativity, hard work and also a lot of fun take place since then. It
wasn't always easy but it's worth it.

• If you can (depending on your knowledge of the situation or research you

can undertake), highlight some key governance challenges in the context of
your GI element, as well as potential options to address them.

1) I think some key governance challenges here in my city are the urban development
pressure caused by the turistic appartment boom combinated with "vulture" funds. This
pressure to urbanize and the way in wich the public land is administrated, externalizing
almost all environmental costs of sealing recharge zones for aquifers, high agricultural
value lands, potential GI elements. All this challenges threaten the GI at almost every
level.

Potential options to adress this problems are including in our urban and territorial
planning the GI and stablishing a limit to the extent in wich soil is sealed and urbanized.
Examples of this way of land management is the planning of Valencia, Vitoria-Gasteiz
or Barcelona.

2) Other challenge is the lack of knowledge about ecosystem services and the
importance of habitat conectivity that general public and even people at the government
suffer.

To adress this problem we can communicate them, quantify and back with data the
benefits of a rich GI.

In order to increase GI in our municipality, we need to work with all the stakeholders
implied and that in order to do that we need to keep in mind that our interests,
timeframes and values will ussually be different, also what each stakeholder can bring
to the table and the amount of power and connections it can have will vary from one
another.

We'll also have to make an effort to brind data, arguments but also engaging narratives
if we want to get more people involved.

The LUIGI project analysis are very interesting, as they have found some causes of the
conflicts and gaps between different stakeholders and looked for possible solutions.

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Economic aspects
 What are some products or services from your GI element? Could they
potentially be exchanged on a market? Who would be the beneficiaries
and the suppliers? Who would be willing to pay for them?

In the urban kitchen garden, a space for educational or recreational activities could be
exchanged. Also little plants for taking them home. Furthermore, flood prevention
services and biodiversity services could reduce costs for the local council in flood
prevention.

The beneficiaries for the educational and recreational activities could be the near
neighbours and schools, the providers could be artistic or environmental or even
language academies and foundations.
I don't know yet if they are noumerous enough.

I think the beneficiaries would be willing to pay.

 Do you have a business idea for your GI element (you can dare to
dream!)? Choose the GI business model canvas or the nature-based
solution model presented in Week 5 (or another model if you’d like) and
start drafting a plan for your idea.

I think the place of the community urban garden El Caminito shouldn’t be making a
business, because as it administrated by a non-profit association, we are not allowed to
get economic benefits for it. But we can be a place for environmental education and
political action to get to more GI elements in our city.

TIME FOR ACTION!

• What is your next step to turn your knowledge and ideas on your GI
element into active management? Who do you need to involve first and
what resources do you need to secure

I’d like to get in touch with other associations and groups and people interested in GI
and knit a network that can support new urban gardens, come up with solutions for our
shared problems and press the local government to protect and enhance the GI of our
neighbourhoods and our city, not only technically but also in the urban planing and
therefore legally.

Some of the actions I’m thinking of, the ones more related to El Caminito directly, are
seed bombs, hotel insects or bird homes workshops to put in the neighbourhood. I’d
also like it to function like a nursery so people could visit us and take plants or sedes
home (adapted to our everyday dryer climate), etc. Anyway, we will continue
implementing our educational work.