The Healing Grid Project: unlocking the potential of Nature Based Solutions in Timisoara, Romania

Urban growth place nowadays great pressures on the peri-urban area, where sprawl-induced processes limits the functioning of green infrastructures. In Timisoara the collapsing network of drainage channels surrounding the city could be renewed putting value of their ecosystem services, in order to un-lock the potential of these nature based solutions to increase city's resilience.

The Healing Grid Project, framed by the Timisoara Resilience Lab, reveals the opportunity of leveraging on the existing drainage network - in Timisoara’s Pole of Growth - to become the inception of a new green-blue healing grid, functioning as a system of interconnected ecological corridors. The Healing Grid would facilitate the access of fauna and flora in the urban tissue, create spaces for recreation and social interaction, stimulate green mobility in the region, allows climate change adaptation and increase the general urban comfort.

The purpose of The Healing Grid initiative is to advocate and capitalize on the role of ecological corridors through bottom-up awareness and top-down actions which will eventually lead to new legislative proposals. The initiative has a participative and multidisciplinary approach, thus facilitates the collaboration between diverse professionals (urban planners, IT specialists, landscape architects, biologists, engineers, geographers) and local actors (academics, institutions, city halls, NGOs, inhabitants).