Monitoring and modeling urban sprinkling: a new perspective of land take

According to the studies done until now on the recent urban transformation dynamics, namely urban sprinkling, this thesis aims to investigate the phenomenon from different points of view to bring out its unsustainable character. The urban dispersion phenomena, specific characteristic of low-density territories, will be examined through the sprinkling index by including new components in addition to the traditional settlement system components. It allows to evaluate the shape of the anthropic settlements and the distance between them which often results in fragmentation of the urban settlements which in turn generate landscape fragmentation. Nowadays, both in the proximity of large cities and in more external areas such as rural areas, there are often evidences of strong fragmentation of the anthropic settlements in which, even if the amount of occupied surface (land take) may not seem worrying, its configuration determines a general decrease in ecological connectivity, landscape quality and general degradation of soil functions. The general hypothesis is that fragmentation (of urban, landscape and habitat) can become an indicator of land take. In fact, it is not enough to consider only the loss of natural or agricultural areas, but also the distribution of buildings in the landscape matrix, i.e., its spatial component. An emblematic case is that of Basilicata region whose dynamics of transformation from the 50s to the present day will be investigated in this thesis. According to the latest report of the Italian Institute for Environmental Protection and Research (ISPRA 2020), the Basilicata region has only 3.15% of land consumption compared to the entire regional surface. This indicator is in contrast with the shape of the anthropic settlements which results fragmented and dispersed. It is essential that the effects of fragmentation as well as ecosystem disaggregation take on a "measurable" character, joining the list of indicators of urban and territorial quality such as land take and land consumption that European Union addresses to national communities currently consider essential and decisive to highlighting the efficiency/inefficiency of environmental and landscape management. It is crucial to understand and investigate what have been and will be in the future the most influential drivers on these dynamics that contribute intrinsically to land consumption and to define the addresses or the thresholds to contain this pulverized and disordered dissemination of anthropic settlements

Indicators for monitoring the Sustainability of Transformations in Territorial Planning

This research aims to identify a set of indicators for the Abruzzo Region to monitor the sustainability of the transformations in territorial planning, in order to focus the “position” of the Region with respect to the goals of the National Sustainable Development Strategy (NSDS) and the 17 Goals of the 2030 Agenda. The proposed methodology consists of: a coherence analysis with the aim of verifying the existence of a convergence between the goals and the general strategies of the Abruzzo Region’s Plans, and the Goals/Principles of environmental sustainability derived from the NSDS; a recognition of the sustainability indicators already developed by various public/private institutions, at national level, in order to select the most suitable sustainable development indicators for the Abruzzo Region

Ecosystem services’ based impact assessment for low carbon transition processes

Low carbon transition represents one of the main challenges engaging territorial governments in a multiscale structure of planning and actions. The thematic focus on renewable energies sources (RES) development prevailed on an integrated approach to plan such relevant process in a more integrated and systemic view based on multiple territorial values estimation and the assessmen

Application of field surveys and multitemporal in-SAR interferometry analysis in the recognition of deep-seated gravitational slope deformation of an urban area of Southern Italy

The analysis of 4 year In-SAR Interferometry images and a detailed geomorphological survey have been carried out to detect a large Deep-Seated Gravitational Slopes (DSGSD) affecting the urban area of the Episcopia village, in Southern Italy. The DSGSD largely develops within phyllites of the Liguride Units and, in the upper slope, within Pleistocene sand and conglomerate deposits of the Sant'Arcangelo Basin. Field survey has shown trenches at the top and an evident bulge at the base of the DSGSD, corresponding to the Talweg of the Sinni River. Geological and geomorphological field surveys allowed us to hypothesize a listric geometry of the DSGSD subsurface plane reaching about 700 m of depth. Furthermore, the multi-temporal In-SAR Interferometry analysis collected from November 2014 to May 2017 revealed that a ground deformation of ±30 mm was occurred, and the process is still active in the whole area

Air Quality and Environmental Effects Due to COVID-19 in Tehran, Iran: Lessons for Sustainability

The 2019 coronavirus disease (COVID-19) global pandemic spread can be considered a disastrous crisis that, in a given geographical area, significantly affects the increase in mortality rate with direct and indirect impacts on different scales and social, economic, political, and ecological factors. The effects of this crisis can be more intense in urban areas with high population density. Due to the more significant presence of vulnerable groups, the risk of death increases significantly. This research describes the environmental impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic in the city of Tehran, the 37th most populated city in the world. The concentration of six air pollutants (carbon monoxide (CO), ozone (O3), nitrogen dioxide (NO2), particulate matter with a diameter of 10 microns (PM10), sulfur dioxide (SO2), particulate matter with a diameter of fewer than 2.5 microns (PM2.5) and the Air Quality Index (AQI) were measured in 22 urban regions of Tehran before (20 March) and from (21 March to 10 February) the lockdown, in air pollution evaluation stations. In order to conduct this research, first, the values of the air pollutant indices of the 22 districts of Tehran in the two previous periods (before 20 March) and during quarantine (21 March to 10 February) were obtained from the air pollution measurement stations of the 22 districts of Tehran, together with the results. After the operationalization and quantification of the indicators according to the research objectives, they were entered into the ArcGIS environment, and the spatial analysis of each pollutant was performed, before and during the quarantine. Finally, it was found that the AQI was reduced from 74.95 to 54.15

Sustainability of Territorial Transformations evaluation against SDG 11. Comparison between Abruzzo and Sardinia (Italy)

This research compares and contrasts the spatial transformations of the inner areas of Abruzzo and Sardinia, two structurally distinct Italian regions. Two territories that are different in terms of their geographical and territorial position, but comparable in terms of their extensive inner areas and resulting pressing problems with land management and planning policies. The application of an Index of Sustainability of Territorial Transformations (ISTT) aims to highlight the structural problems of inner areas (insular and non-insular) through the assessment of the sustainability (environmental, social and economic) of the new territorial transformations that continue to progress in contexts frequently characterised by a high degree of naturalness and by significant de-population phenomena. Utilising all three dimensions of sustainability with three key indicators, ISA, ISS and ISE respectively, the ISTT will make it possible to design common policies on the inner areas of the Italian regions. Therefore, an analytical and original approach is proposed to emphasise the importance of actions planned according to the geographical entity in which the inland areas are located and to strengthen their cohesion with more developed territories

Discretization of the Urban and Non-Urban Shape: Unsupervised Machine Learning Techniques for Territorial Planning

One of the goals of the scientific community is to equip the discipline of spatial planning with efficient tools to handle huge amounts of data. In this sense, unsupervised machine learning techniques (UMLT) can help overcome this obstacle to further the study of spatial dynamics. New machine-learning-based technologies make it possible to simulate the development of urban spatial dynamics and how they may interact with ecosystem services provided by nature. Modeling information derived from various land cover datasets, satellite earth observation and open resources such as Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) represent a key structural step for geospatial support for land use planning. Sustainability is certainly one of the paradigms on which planning and the study of past, present and future spatial dynamics must be based. Topics such as Urban Ecosystem Services have assumed such importance that they have become a prerogative on which to guide the administration in the difficult process of transformation, taking place not only in the urban context, but also in the peri-urban one. In this paper, we present an approach aimed at analyzing the performance of clustering methods to define a standardized system for spatial planning analysis and the study of associated dynamics. The methodology built ad hoc in this research was tested in the spatial context of the city of L’Aquila (Abruzzo, Italy) to identify the urbanized and non-urbanized area with a standardized and automatic method