The challenges and opportunity of protected natural areas in Italy: the case study of "Simeto oasis”.

In contemporary society, the force of human progress and the need for the conservation of nature are often perceived as conflicting values, which causes obvious errors and contradictions in the management of the territory. The processes of industrialisation and of urbanisation, and the associated socio-cultural mutations that they provoked, that began in the nineteenth century and culminated in the last century, have led to the bipolarisation of the relationship between artifice and nature: the urban-industrial condition, in which we live and work, on one side, and the natural condition, in which we take refuge, on the other. A strong sign of change in community policy can be seen with the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), held in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, at which “Agenda 21” was introduced, which establishes the importance of realising a territorialisation of environmental policies, in other words, of bringing places back to the specific local reality to meet the requirements and needs that individual populations develop in their own territorial context. In relation to this new approach to the management of the territory, it is no longer possible to separate the environmental component from the anthropic; consequently, the concept of a protected area as a “sanctuary of nature dissolves today into a more evolved conception, as a necessary condition, complementary to the experience of everyday life”. Participative territorial planning, through the methodology of mutlicriterial analysis adopted in this paper, defines a shared approach to achieve a participative ecological vision that considers a protected area as a place of knowledge and sustainable techniques, in which planning and management interventions are necessary to make possible the perpetuation of the natural resources, of the traditional human activities, and of the living conditions representative of the place.