Abstract
This study investigates long-term landscape transformations (1949–2016) in urban Rome, Central Italy, through a spatial distribution of seven metrics (core, islet, perforation, edge, loop, bridge, branch) derived from a Morphological Spatial Pattern Analysis (MSPA) analyzed separately for seven land-use classes (built-up areas, arable land, crop mosaic, vineyards, olive groves, forests, pastures). A Principal Component Analysis (PCA) has been finally adopted to characterize landscape structure at 1949 and 2016. Results of the MSPA demonstrate how both natural and agricultural land-uses have decreased following urban expansion. Moreover, the percent ‘core’ area of each class declined substantially, although with different intensity. These results clearly indicate ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ after long-term landscape transformations: urban settlements and forests belong to the former category, the remaining land-use classes (mostly agricultural) belong to the latter category. Descriptive statistics and multivariate exploratory techniques finally documented the intrinsic complexity characteristic of actual landscapes. The findings of this study also demonstrate how settlements have expanded chaotically over the study area, reflecting a progressive ‘fractalization’ and inhomogeneity of fringe landscapes, with negative implications for metropolitan sustainability at large. These transformations were unable to leverage processes of settlement and economic re-agglomeration around sub-centers typical of polycentric development in the most advanced socioeconomic contexts.
Highlights
Moving further away from inner cities, vastly different landscapes have been more intensively shaped by settlement expansion
Rome’s climate is typically Mediterranean with rainfalls concentrated in autumn and spring and our study presents polycentric urban growth as a candidate for a feasible and more sustainable means of metropolitan development and, possibly, urban containment, in compact Mediterranean cities
While built-upfor areas expanded significantly in 1949 to Forests increased moderately and other land use classes remained largely stable
Summary
Moving further away from inner cities, vastly different landscapes have been more intensively shaped by settlement expansion. Geo-Inf. 2021, 10, 231 countries is becoming increasingly multifaceted because of the mutual interplay of environmental and planning spheres that influence the sustainable development of regions and local communities [7,8,9] In this sense, exurban development has been strongly influenced by land prices’ variations, altering the equilibrium of forces, which has profoundly shaped the actual organization of economic activities within cities [1,10,11,12]. The third, even more frequent way of urban growth is the exurban development (i.e., the characteristic pattern of urban expansion following low-density settlements scattered on a natural or agricultural matrix [1,28,29] resulting in urban morphologies very different from the traditional monocentric and polycentric structures [30,31,32])
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