From fallow to flourishing: Nbs ideas and implementation strategies For Belfast

Implementing nature-based solutions (NBS) in Belfast offers distinct challenges and
opportunities shaped by the city’s unique post-industrial landscape and complex sociopolitical history. The city’s fractured urban form – marked by aging infrastructure, derelict land, and the remnants of industries such as shipbuilding. glassworks and linen production – create a patchwork of both obstacles and potential.

This presentation explores a series of NBS initiatives in Belfast that collectively
demonstrate the spectrum of implementation strategies, from top-down planning to
bottom-up co-creation. It examines how these approaches generate different kinds of
social, ecological, and spatial outcomes, and how they reflect varying theories of change within the urban context.

Top-down approaches often emphasise large-scale strategic interventions – such as
citywide urban agriculture systems, integrated food–water–energy networks and urban intensification of underused areas. These projects leverage institutional power, long-term planning and qualitative evaluation methods to explore systemic shifts in lifestyle, infrastructure and economy.

In contrast, bottom-up initiatives emerge through collaboration with local communities, focusing on co-design, participatory visioning and small-scale site activation. Projects such as the UPSURGE urban park foreground community agency, place-based knowledge and experimental design processes that challenge conventional procurement and governance models.

Together, these diverse cases illuminate how NBS can become vehicles for cultural
regeneration, environmental repair and civic innovation. The paper argues that the
interplay between bottom-up and top-down modes of implementation – and the role of design within both – is crucial to unlocking