Green spaces in informal settlements: Planning failures and green infrastructure loss in Amirieh, Iran

This paper examines the interactions between planning systems, legal frameworks and green infrastructure (GI) assets in informal settlements by analysing the case of Amirieh, Iran. It seeks to address gaps in the literature by examining how, despite the importance of promoting sustainable development in informal urban contexts, planning dynamics may contribute to the degradation of GI in rapidly urbanising areas. Using a qualitative research approach, the paper demonstrates how laws intended to protect green areas can actually accelerate their erosion in an environment of perverse incentives and weak institutions. It highlights how the neglect of public environmental benefits in favour of capital development can exacerbate existing social inequalities in an informal settlement. • This paper illustrates how formal legal plans and the Acts designed to conserve Agricultural and garden lands, jointly accelerate the loss of Amirieh’s gardens to housing, through formalisation degrading GI. • Advances a push–pull explanatory framework: political-institutional “pull” (short tenures, visible-project bias, entrepreneurial municipal finance, legal loopholes) versus environmental/financial “push” (drought, water scarcity, rising costs, falling yields) driving GI loss. • Fills a documented lacuna in urban greening scholarship by analysing how formal frameworks undermine GI specifically in an informal-settlement context, extending Global South evidence. • Empirically substantiated through 37 interviews, structured field observation, and multi-scalar plan review with thematic analysis and triangulation. • Identifies socio-environmental consequences, loss of ecosystem services, livelihoods and cultural identity, and pathways to environmental injustice/green gentrification, worsening heat, flooding and air-quality risks.