The natural environment in urban areas

Abstract

The natural environment is, in people’s mind, out of the cities, and could not belong to the urban environment. It is separated far from the cities. As a consequence, people are very surprised when speaking of geoconservation or geological heritage inside urbanized areas, just in their doorstep. Living in towns and cities does not mean that we have to renounce completely our relation with nature. On the contrary, town-dwellers need an every day contact with nature. This contact improves the quality of human life. Of course in some modern cities this demand will be hard to achieve in short term, but it should be a long-term aim, through a conservation and protection of free spaces policy. Such a policy has to be incorporated in all other policies. The result will be the harmonicus coexistence of nature and city. In the case of Pireas, the main international harbour and one of the biggest cities in Greece, the conditions are far from being sufficient concerning the above mentioned problematics. However, Pireas is a very nice city by nature, degraded by men. Few natural sites are left, always under threat regime because of the pressure of other priorities and the high ground prices. The rapid disappearance of sites and consequently the irreversible loss of information is between the geoscientific issues in relation with the modern cities that should be included in the urban geology topics.