La questione delle aree agricole e gli strumenti di piano territoriale e urbanistico

Abstract

- Cities today expand regardless of economic development and growth in the labour market. We are in the presence of a phenomenon of urban inflation in which even the consumption of land remains at high quantitative levels, accentuated by the marginalisation of many portions of areas induced by the dispersion of settlements and infrastructure networks. On the other hand agriculture is also undergoing a process of the concentration of production on flat areas of land with more infrastructures, while in contrast to this, less accessible tracts of land enclosed between dwellings and adjacent to urbanised areas are abandoned and underused. In this context the incessant erosion of urban countryside raises the more general question of the quality of living and of the environmental and landscape functions which agricultural areas perform in addition to and not as a substitute for their production functions. And this makes it clear that to protect and improve them are not objectives attributable to urban planning and sector instruments alone.