The sustainable Mediterranean city: perspectives for prosperous urban landscapes

Sustainable, fair and respectful are terms often connected to landscape design, while they can also be regarded to urban design practices, especially when landscape meets interstices or peripheral urban areas, and correlates to sustainable processes of change in cities' social, economic and environmental evolution (SDG 11). When associated to urban form, these terms open avenues of research as well as promising areas of growth in the ability of landscape design to further inform urban morphology design. In particular, when design is connected to urban-territory form analysis, it can reveal patterns of change that can actively contribute to the wider adaptability of cities. This is particularly relevant in the case of many medium-sized Mediterranean city, set in direct connection to natural / territorial structure and pieces of agricultural lands. In this case, landscape analysis and design can help in adopting and implementing integrated strategic plans for sustainable development, resource efficiency, social inclusion, mitigation, safety, accessibility and finally the so-called "resilience". This paper aims at dealing with the role of landscape design in defining a consistent sustainability for the Mediterranean urban landscape, which has often been lost during the last decades, due to natural and anthropic changes, and where the recovery is needed, in a consistent connection with the urban morphology and the territorial structure, to give also answers to climate change related issues. Spanning from analysis to design, it aims at presenting some landscape design proposals for the urban regeneration, through the reconstruction of the continuity between countryside and city. Territorial and environmental analysis will lead design at transforming interstices and boundaries areas into multifunctional public spaces able to re-knitting the agriculture landscape to the peripheral urban forms, strongly linked to the identity of the places.