Nature conservation in the urban landscape planning

Abstract

This contribution briefly reflects on the evolution of nature in the city, according to the existing literature on landscape in the Italian urban planning tradition. New approaches to the urban nature conservation strongly depend on the regulations that planning can give in terms of local ecosystem services, absorption of pollutants in the atmosphere, noise reduction and allocation of places for recreation. The conservation of nature in the city is also part of the global effort to stop the biodiversity decline. In fact, landscape, the urban one, has the ability to introduce the social dimension and is therefore functional to the implementation of urban nature conservation frameworks. Current urbanizations, which are closest to natural areas, often demonstrate at all scales a lack of social and ecological relationships: the risk is a conceptual and physical insularization, which reduces public support to nature conservation, causes a further loss of biodiversity and does not promote the generation of new ecosystem services. One of the main future challenges will therefore be to convert the existing conservation strategies and introduce specific regulations in planning for natural areas that may be better integrated with the urban context: this contribution discusses the fact that the landscape can be the element that may drive this integration.