Abstract
ABSTRACT The integration of field surveys, bibliographic research and multitemporal analysis of historical maps, aerial photographs and satellite images in a GIS environment, allowed the current and past geomorphological features of the old city of Alessandria and its surrounding areas, NW Italy, to be identified and mapped. Their analysis provided an overview of the geomorphological evolution of the city that is strictly related to the historical vicissitudes occurred since the Middle Ages. Nowadays, the most representative landforms and deposits characterizing the urban landscape result from human interventions and are associated with ancient military facilities and infrastructures, a historical man-made channel network no longer recognizable, the Tanaro riverbed channelization, and the urban sprawl occurred from the second half of the nineteenth century onwards. This study represents a useful tool for urban planning and management and for raising the citizens’ awareness of the urban-landscape geomorphological features and evolution, and therefore the geo-hydrological risk.
Highlights
The growing ‘urban geomorphology’ focuses just on the analysis of the anthropogenic intervention intended as an environmentchanging process that results in modifying the pristine landforms, creating anthropogenic landforms and influencing the ever-changing geomorphological processes (Thornbush, 2015)
This paper aims to describe the geomorphological features of the city of Alessandria, NW Italy, and present the related geomorphological map
The implemented methods allowed us for the identification, classification, and mapping of numerous fluvial and anthropogenic landforms in the old city of Alessandria and its immediate surroundings
Summary
The analysis of landforms and geomorphological processes is widely known to be an essential tool in land management, urban planning, and geo-hydrological risk mitigation (Alcántara-Ayala, 2002; Cooke, 1976).More than half of the world’s population are living in urban areas that generally developed transforming step by step the landscape and destroying the former landforms (Bathrellos, 2007; Cooper et al, 2018; Crutzen, 2002; Gregory, 2006; Ritchie & Roser, 2019; Tarolli & Sofia, 2016; Thornbush & Allen, 2018). The severe impact of the urban sprawl on the natural environment often triggered difficult relationships of coexistence between urban systems and ever-changing geomorphological processes (Goudie, 2018; Mandarino et al, 2019a), even due to the exacerbation of phenomena most probably associated with climate change (Acquaotta et al, 2018, 2019; Faccini et al, 2018; Witze, 2018). The growing ‘urban geomorphology’ focuses just on the analysis of the anthropogenic intervention intended as an environmentchanging process that results in modifying the pristine landforms, creating anthropogenic landforms and influencing the ever-changing geomorphological processes (Thornbush, 2015) These elements brought to the transformation of the natural environment into an anthropogenic landscape (Cooke, 1976; Thornbush & Allen, 2018)
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