Mainstreaming schoolyard renaturalization in participatory urban spatial planning: insights from a municipal schoolyard greening pilot program.

We explore the role of schoolyard renaturalization in urban spatial planning for transformative change. Our contribution draws on a case study of a municipal schoolyard greening pilot program launched in 2022 in Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain, which has supported the renaturalization of 14 public pre- and primary schoolyards. The pilot emerged as a response to a manifesto from municipal parents’ associations demanding healthier and greener school environments, reflecting bottom-up pressure for more just and biodiversity-inclusive land use. It also represents an attempt at cross-sectoral collaboration between municipal departments and educational communities, grounded in a vision for long-term co-governance of schoolyards, increased equity in decision-making, and the mainstreaming of schoolyard greening in local spatial planning.However, this ambitious vision is challenged by complex administrative structures, institutional fragmentation, and diverse imaginaries concerning the function of schoolyards in education and urbanism. Our participatory action research approach, which combines document analysis, archival data, and field- and workshop-based research, investigates these tensions while co-producing pathways for a future schoolyard greening program where biodiversity, democracy, and equity become central principles of school(yard) governance.We find that governance arrangements, regulations, and dominant paradigms across the interconnected sectors of education and urban planning currently maintain unequal power relations and reinforce top-down decision-making. Yet, as school communities and municipal actors, both as insiders and outsiders to institutional dynamics, navigate these barriers, their actions increasingly challenge existing lock-ins. We identify an emerging relational narrative shift, visible for instance in how actors place growing emphasis on care as learned and practiced in schoolyards — towards peers, place, and non-human nature. Such a shift implies longer and deeper participatory processes, enabling educational communities to influence planning decisions in ways that reflect their lived needs and aspirations.Learning processes between institutional and community actors have already prompted adjustments to overcome previous shortcomings, build on successes, and respond to stakeholder feedback. This dynamic reveals the potential for an adaptive form of co-governance in municipal schoolyard greening — and highlights schoolyards as strategic sites in biodiversity-positive and socially just spatial planning transformations.