Citation: Mofrad, F.; Ignatieva, M. What Is the Future of the Bush Capital? A Socio-Ecological Approach to Enhancing Canberra’s Green Infrastructure. Land 2023, 12, 39. https://doi.org/10.3390/ land12010039 Academic Editors: Iwona Cie´ slak, Andrzej Bilozor and Luca Salvati Received: 10 November 2022 Revised: 14 December 2022 Accepted: 19 December 2022 Published: 23 December 2022 Copyright: © 2022 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/). land Article What Is the Future of the Bush Capital? A Socio-Ecological Approach to Enhancing Canberra’s Green Infrastructure Fahimeh Mofrad * and Maria Ignatieva School of Design, The University of Western Australia, 35 Stirling Highway, Crawley, WA 6009, Australia * Correspondence: fahimeh.mofrad@research.uwa.edu.au Abstract: Canberra, a city known as a “garden city” that emerged in the early twentieth century, is developing at a speedy rate. The compact city vision for Canberra was announced in ACT Planning Strategy 2018 while the city encounters climate change impacts. Although urban compaction has its own benefits, it is considered a challenge for maintaining and developing the quality and quantity of urban green spaces. Canberra owns a unique urban design legacy and is known for its bush capital/garden city character, which has intertwined the social and ecological layers of the city. The concern around urban compaction and densification calls for holistic green infrastructure (GI) planning to balance the built and non-built infrastructure. To do so, it is necessary to understand the underlying social-cultural and ecological layers of Canberra’s green spaces and the Ecosystem Services (ESS) they offer. The application of multiple ESS in the current GI planning and governance practices is another issue that needs to be examined to inform future development. Thus, this qualitative research seeks to understand the ESS discourses in Canberra’s GI and the challenges in applying these ESS in planning and governance. We used a socio-ecological approach to design the research and understand the multidimensional values and benefits of Canberra’s green spaces. We adopted semi-structured interviews with twelve experts from relevant disciplines with specific knowledge of Canberra’s urban landscape and green spaces to find out the socio-ecological synopsis of Canberra’s GI and green spaces governance. We found that it is necessary to mainstream multiple ESS in Canberra’s GI to amplify the existing socio-ecological values. The abundance of green spaces in Canberra can be better used to make a multifunctional landscape that serves multiple ESS. However, we identified the maintenance and budget issues as the main challenges that can be addressed by improving community engagement. To design an effective GI network and mainstream ESS in green spaces, the planning and governance system should employ a transdisciplinary, multi-object and multi-scale approach and state-of-the-art technologies. Moreover, this research underlined the importance of a protocol and guidelines that monitor the landscape projects’ design and delivery correspondence to the high-level policies. Keywords: green infrastructure; green space; socio-ecological thinking; green infrastructure governance; Canberra 1. Introduction Urban compaction is known as an effective strategy to control urban sprawl and urban development’s destructive impact on natural elements [1,2]. However, it is a potential threat to the quality and quantity of urban green spaces (UGS) [3]. In addition, there is an increasing concern regarding the climate change crisis, which has drawn decision-makers’ attention to the importance of green spaces for increasing urban resilience [4–7]. Rapid urbanisation, urban compaction, and the climate change crisis have resulted in a growing interest in UGS and developing approaches to integrate UGS in urban planning to benefit people and environment [8–11]. One of the tools to enhance the human environment and conserve nature is Green Infrastructure (GI). GI was introduced as a strategic planning network of interconnected Land 2023, 12, 39. https://doi.org/10.3390/land12010039 https://www.mdpi.com/journal/land