Abstract
For more than a decade, the European Union recognizes soil as a common good and considers it as a finite resource of inestimable value. The European Union defines it as the “upper layer of earth’s crust, formed by mineral particles, organic matter, water, air and living organisms”. Despite such definitions, usually, planning choices do not take into account the need to reduce soil consumption to build up resilience. This paper presents the controversial case of Agri Valley (Basilicata, Southern Italy); on the one hand, this region is characterized by the presence of extremely valuable land, because of the exceptional degree of soil fertility; on the other hand, Valdagri is also known to have one of the largest oilfields of Europe. An application built around the SLEUTH model was developed in order to produce a simulation and an estimate of the extent to which urban areas may grow in the near future. Results confirm that urban policies implemented so far by local governments—which aimed almost exclusively to favor industrial development—irreversibly threaten the integrity of the natural values of the valley.
Highlights
ObjectiveEleven “Cities” aims to make towns and human settlements more inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable
On September 2015 the UN defined and formalized the agenda for sustainable development during a meeting held in New York
The results show the need for strong legislative action
Summary
Eleven “Cities” aims to make towns and human settlements more inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable. 25% of the housing stock is unsold and 2.3 million families cannot afford a house These phenomena are still present, if with a lesser extent, in applied for a wide variety of topics (from theory oriented application to empirical investigation of land use changes, from urban sprawl to biodiversity losses) [25,26], and in a range of very diverse areas, included some regions in south Italy [16,27,28]. SLEUTH workflow is rather simple; it needs multiple input data for multiple time stamps in the past that must be spatially coherent, by overlaying these maps it investigates the characterization of each landcover transition which occurred at any location within the region of interest, and built-in growth cell dynamic rules regulate the behavior of each cell under specific neighborhood conditions so to simulate landuse dynamics and urbanization for the future. This procedure is meant to be applied to larger intervals of coefficients that are progressively narrowed according to OSM results
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