Green infrastructure offers a contemporary approach to the
conceptualisation and management of landscape resources and has
developed rapidly in the UK, Europe and North America. As a result it
has been proposed as meeting a number of the ecological, economic and
social challenges of spatial planning. The attention given to the growth
of green infrastructure has been supported by the development of a
number of overarching principles-principles that provide green
infrastructure research with a multi-layered understanding of the
changing nature of landscape resources. The themes developed identify a
number of conceptual and implementation principles for green
infrastructure. The roles of integrated planning policy, strategic
thinking and multi-functionality are discussed to highlight the
different forms that green infrastructure research can take. Based on
these discussions, this work proposes that a green infrastructure
approach to planning can be used to meet the complex challenges of
current landscape planning. With continued development of green
infrastructure, some of the most pressing issues in planning, such as
climate change or sustainable development, can be addressed.