Marginal periurban agricultural areas: A support method for landscape planning

The significant proportion of often abandoned marginal/enclosed agricultural land in city peripheries has given rise to the need for studying the delicate relationship between built-up areas and rural land. These issues are exacerbated where metropolitan settlement has no bounds and begins to invade the rural space juxtaposed between cities and urban areas.This marginal land, in particular where a minimum of agricultural activity persists, could provide support to urban activities for recreation, farm services and local production of goods, reducing energy consumption, greenhouse-gas emissions, global warming and packaging, conserving biodiversity. These actions will allow the composting and the reuse of treated waste waters for irrigation.In particular, urban agriculture can play an educational role by contributing to reducing crime and improving community/ethnic relations, encouraging time spent in the open air and ensuring food safety.This study describes a methodology related to the analysis, to the identification, of the residual agricultural areas, differentiating them in accordance with the various levels of rurality to indicate the models of use, which allow to enhance the local landscape situations (preservation of the agricultural function or insertion of integrated activities) obtaining the pertinent valorisation. This methodology has been applied to the metropolitan area in the North zone of Catania.The method has three distinct phases: (1) land analysis and GIS construction consists of acquiring and georeferencing cartographic data, field studies to check and update the maps, and carry out a questionnaire on farm data; (2) data processing with GIS to create some thematic maps; (3) proposal of suitable land-use models.