Non Urbanised Areas in Metropolitan context: Between Ecosystem Services and urban sprawl

Non-urbanized areas (NUAs) are outdoor places in urban context with significant amounts of vegetation, representing the last remnants of nature in metropolitan areas. As part of the agricultural and green infrastructure, NUAs provide a different range of Ecosystem Services, such as purification of air and water, mitigation of floods and droughts, re-generation of soil fertility, moderation of temperature extremes and enhancing of landscape quality. Like other natural ecosystems, NUAs today are endangered by urbanization processes, which are the main cause of their fragmentation and loss of evapotranspiring features. For these reasons, the protection of these areas is a fundamental issue for land use planning, and it requires appropriate methods and strategies for their management. This book explores the role and importance of NUAs for urban planning and presents a method for their characterization. The method produces a scenario of new land uses of existing NUAs, aimed at enhancing the production of urban ecosystem services within the agricultural and green infrastructure