From city in the park to ?greenery in plant pots?: The influence of socialist and post-socialist planning on opportunities for cultural ecosystem services

The paper examines the links between the cultural ecosystem services concept, political ideologies and urban planning. In particular, it investigates the extent to which cultural ecosystem services were considered in urban planning in socialist and post-socialist Zagreb. We conducted a content analysis of three socialist and two postsocialist plans of Zagreb and interview transcripts with urban planners and academics. To take account of the relational character of cultural ecosystem services, we assessed the extent to which urban planning facilitated opportunities for human-ecosystem interactions rather than individual cultural ecosystem services themselves. This revealed planning factors that helped promote and discourage conditions for CES to arise. The findings indicated that socialist planning facilitated interaction opportunities to a wider extent than post-socialist planning, mainly by providing abundant, fair-sized, well-distributed green spaces with clearly outlined functions. The proposed assessment approach could be implemented in the planning process to evaluate how conditions for CES generation are provided by the current planning cycle and inform the process in the following cycle.