Green Infrastructure (GI) is a planned and managed network of multifunctional green space which can provide a healthy and rich environment. The wide range of green infrastructure assets includes:

• Allotments; 
• Amenity space, including communal green spaces within housing areas; 
• Green corridors, including hedgerows, ditches, disused railways and verges; 
• Brownfield and Greenfield sites; 
• Urban parks and gardens; 
• Registered commons and village and town greens; 
• Children’s play space; 
• Natural and semi-natural habitat for wildlife; 
• Playing fields; 
• Cemeteries; 
• Pocket parks; 
• Country parks;
• Woodland;
• Historic parks and gardens and historic landscapes
• Nature reserves;

• Sites of Special Scientific Interest and Scheduled Monuments; 
• Locally designated heritage sites, including county wildlife sites; 
• Waterways and waterbodies, including flooded quarries; 
• Development sites with potential for open space and links; 
• Land in agri-environmental management; and

Green infrastructure plans identify priority areas for protecting and improving existing green infrastructure and creating new in order to develop a network of multi-functional greenspaces.

As part of this process we have developed GI plans at a variety of scales across Central Bedfordshire, notably;

• A strategic level plan covering the whole county of Bedfordshire;
• District level plans, for Mid Bedfordshire and for Luton and Southern Bedfordshire; and
• Community level plans, developed by many individual towns and parishes across Central Bedfordshire.

Designing Green Infrastructure into new developments means that the new development becomes an attractive, sustainable place. Guidance has been developed by a range of partners across Bedfordshire, Buckinghamshire, Northamptonshire and Milton Keynes. This guidance is highly regarded, and has received a national Landscape Institute award, and a regional Royal Town Planning Institute Award. The guidance is easy to use; it sets out design principles that allow for green spaces to transform urban life by cooling cities, filtering out pollutants, improving people’s health, supporting wildlife and creating attractive places to live and work in. These design principles serve as a checklist for developers and planners, both in designing high quality environments for people and wildlife and ensuring high standards are achieved in the evaluation of planning applications. http://bedsandlutongreeninfrastructure.org/pdfs/MKSM-GI-by-Design-Guide.pdf

Central Bedfordshire Council is part of the Bedfordshire and Luton Green Infrastructure Consortium, a countywide partnership that promotes the idea of green infrastructure. It co-ordinates green infrastructure planning and delivery. To find out more, seewww.bedsandlutongreeninfrastructure.org