Anthropogenic climate change, together with socio-political crises, are highlighting the relevance of natural environments for the survival and well-being of people and the planet. This is particularly visible in cities and urbanized areas, where the presence of green or blue areas is limited. 

Scientists working across the natural, physical and social sciences, landscape architects and policymakers, among others, are researching the benefits of urban, green and blue infrastructures (GBI), also called ‘nature-based solutions’, in mitigating issues such as the heat island effect, noise pollution, or flooding, to help design new GBI in urbanising areas and retrofit existing ones in consolidated cities. 

However, to better understand what GBI do, we need to know what they are made of, examining the biodiversity, soil, and air they are part of. It is also important to know who uses them and how, and who is excluded from their use and why. Their role in sociocultural traditions and events, how they are valued, maintained, accessed, and how they change over time. 

We believe that to contribute to socio-environmental justice it is necessary to expand how natural environments (including GBI) look like. 

One of the knowledge gaps identified by RECLAIM Network is the lack of images for public use that illustrate how GBI are in practice. We are calling emerging and established photographers to submit their work and contribute to creating an image bank to foster the promotion and knowledge about urban green and blue infrastructures.

This competition aims to create the first worldwide public image database on GBGI hosted on Wikimedia Commons, the free media repository, to:

• Collect references of existing GBIs. You can find a complete list of identified GBIs in this link.

• Expand our understanding of nature. Moving away from idealized images of nature and GBGI, often represented in photography as bright green and lush, to look at other forms of nature in urban settings.

• Explore ‘forgotten’ towns and cities. Featuring urban contexts left aside from funding and investment and integrating people and everyday life, as well as exploring concepts of deprivation, decay, pollution, etc.

• Expand the aesthetics of green/blue infrastructures. Acknowledge their changes across climates, seasons, weather, times of the day, use, life cycle, etc. 

• Create the first GBI image bank open to the public. Make all submissions available under Creative Commons so that the images can be used by designers, policymakers, schools, researchers, etc.