Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
8.4.7
Relationships between Urban Green Spaces and
Surrounding Nature Areas
Roberto Canullo, Giandiego Campetella, Stefano Chelli,
and Marco Cervellini
The landscape collects both the presence of visible elements—natural and
human—and invisible ones, such as ownership types, labor relations, and
so on [1]; in other words, “landscape” means an area, as perceived by peo-
ple, whose character is the result of the action and interaction of natural
and/or human factors (European Landscape Convention, 2000).
The amount and availability of green space is strongly and positively
associated with people's perceived general health than urbanity.
Furthermore, this relationship occurs in different degrees [2]. However,
urban and surrounding “
green areas
” differ in structure and function, pro-
viding different types of ecosystem services (and therefore, different levels
of perceived quality of life).
The
Adriatic city
is characterized by a highly fragmented and hetero-
geneous landscape, where human infrastructures, urban green spaces, urban
agriculture, and nature areas, penetrate each other generating a complex
mosaic. This is particularly true for some of the most important coastal and
high-density urban cores
of the Marche Region (i.e., Ancona, Civitanova
Marche, Pesaro, and San Benedetto del Tronto). This particular spatial pat-
tern and its relationship with the perceived quality of life of the population
who live and operate in this mosaic have not yet been studied.
In the future, and particularly for the Adriatic city, it seems fundamen-
tal to plan the urban and surrounding areas with a renewed methodology
that considers the territory as a continuous dynamic system of ecological,
human, and landscape components, in a more stable relationship.
Coordinated and structured analytical approaches, like the one proposed
here, can support decision-makers in informing spatial planning policies
that maximize the beneficial effects of green spaces for the
quality of life
of urban residents.
8.4.7.1 Methodology
Considering the complex pattern of the landscape of the Adriatic city, our
approach builds on a series of “green categories” [3] that are found to be
associated with improvements in quality of life. This approach will be
implemented through the integration of land use and land cover data (i.e.,
land cover classification and real vegetation maps) in a
geographic infor-
mation system
database.
A spatial pattern analysis of the relationship between green patches and
urban infrastructures will be performed using specialized
landscape analy-
sis software
[4]. The outcome will help detect the organization of the
mosaic and the relative scale at which variability and dependence of land-
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