Resource information
The consumption of natural, agricultural and forest soils that follows urban growth and infrastructural development is responsible for the fragmentation of the open spaces and the ecological connections, and for the functional disorganisation of the territory, bringing relevant environmental, economic and social impacts. The quality and quantity of this consumption relates to the ability to manage, at the different scales, a global phenomenon. Hence, it is necessary to conform the definitions, measures, and representations of the soil consumption, to have reliable information to build policies and intervention programmes. At the same time it is important to identify some shared principles to contrast this phenomenon: the awareness of the public relevance of the soil functions; the inefficiency due to the externalities connected with its use; the need for differentiated solutions; the necessity to adopt an incremental long-term perspective; the opportunities provided by a set of normative, fiscal, and planning instruments; the urgency to act in the places most subject to land transformation pressures, such as the peri-urban areas, in which experience a new alliance between the city and the countryside.
