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Development of greenways represent a planning strategy that seeks to reconcile both nature conservation and human uses. It is crucial for maintaining landscape connectivity in an increasingly anthropized world. Such strategy encompasses complex socio-ecological variables and its success greatly depends on the integration of different types of knowledge and active support from the local communities and stakeholders. This demands participatory planning processes within multidisciplinary platforms that promote a close collaboration between experts and lay people. The goal of this paper is to describe and analyse a participatory planning approach for the early-stage design of a greenway network for municipalities in South Brazil. The majority of southern Brazilian municipalities contain a very high rate of small farms which are under intensive agricultural production, and consequently, harming the natural landscapes. Actions to effectively tackle this problem are scarcely observed. The procedures encompassed by the approach were determined by the context constraints and potentials that make it applicable in the reality at stake. The approach is focusing on the early-stage design of a greenway network plan and comprises two phases with each a multi-stakeholder workshop for the local landscape analysis and the plan co-design by experts and local actors. The application of the approach in a municipality in southern Brazil has enabled local actors to use key concepts of connectivity planning and foster a critical reflection on local issues, and allowed the incorporation of local knowledge into the solution developed by participants. This resulted in a plan tailored to the local reality.

In recent decades, greenways have been the focus of an international movement to improve urban environment quality. In metropolitan areas, more greenways are interconnected, forming a greenway network (GN). A GN is considered to encourage physical activities, but verifying this statement is difficult, as traditional social survey methods do not obtain fine-grain activity geographic data on a large scale. In view of this shortcoming, the volunteered geographic information and the geographic information system techniques were used to describe the distribution of physical activities in a GN, to explore the effects of greenway network features on supporting activities. The 1640-km-long Shenzhen GN was selected as a representative case, and walking, jogging and cycling were chosen as typical activities. The results showed that only a quarter of greenways were with activities. Greenways with dense residences, mixed land-use, advanced street network and large parks yielded positive effects on supporting physical activities, and advanced public transportation further improved activity diversity. Due to the spatial mismatch between the GN distribution and well-developed areas, the GN density showed negative effects on the presence of physical activities; within the greenways in use, the GN density significantly improved activity diversity, indicating the positive effect of network feature on supporting activities. Compared with neighbourhood greenways, city and regional greenways supported more physical activities due to richer natural resources. The findings reveal that GN in green and welldeveloped areas supports physical activities better. Location, green quality and network form are necessary for greenways and should be integrated into GN planning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]