Abandoned areas and urban gardens: a “complex social value” for cities

The contribution to the welfare of citizens that urban gardens can generaterepresents a "social use-value". The social value of horticulture in cities can be expressed bymeans of an appropriate set of indicators describing the produced values.The proposed work, which is the result of an interdisciplinary collaboration, highlights thepotentiality of abandoned and degraded urban areas, and intends to outline a model for theassessment of the social value generated by the introduction of "urban gardens". Theproposed model can be utilised for selecting the most suitable areas for the use in question,for monitoring the effects of policies for urban gardens on urban sustainability, and forconstructing a ranking of sustainable cities, with the aim of triggering virtuous processes of emulation.