Peri-urban Conflicts and Environmental Challenges : A Mediterranean Perspective

Urban expansion and the preservation of fringe landscapes are clearly interconnected issues. This book discusses the relationship between landscape and peri-urban agriculture and the possible implications of sustainable land management for fringe land quality, proposing a framework to evaluate the latent nexus between agro-forest systems and human settlements in Southern Europe. Eco-sustainable planning integrated with multi-faceted policy actions (social, economic, cultural and political dimensions) is a relevant approach to reinforce sustainability of fringe landscapes. Permanent assessment of these factors allows for the implementation of different development scenarios. The present work definitely contributes to systemic and multi-scale approaches informing environmental policies, with the aim of achieving an integrated management of peri-urban agricultural landscapes.

Antonio Tomao graduated in "Forestry and Environmental Sciences" from the University of Tuscia (Viterbo, Italy) in 2011 and holds a PhD in "Landscape and environment design management and planning" from the University of Rome "La Sapienza" in 2015. He is a fixed term researcher at the Council for Research in Agriculture and the Analysis of Agricultural Economics (CREA) and adjunct professor of "urban and territorial planning" at the Department of Economics and Law of the University of Macerata. Since 2011, he has been a collaborator in research activities and subsequently a research fellow (in role until 2021) at the Department for Innovation in Biological, Agro-food and Forest systems (DIBAF) of the University of Tuscia. He has carried out research periods abroad as a "visiting researcher" at the Forest Science and Technology Centre of Catalonia (CTFC) in Spain in 2015 and the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU), in Sweden, in 2019. He has a background and expertise in geomatics applications to environmental monitoring, urban forest risk assessment, urban planning, regional planning and green infrastructure planning.