In the legal framework of urban planning in Mexico, the provision of urban green areas is approached from a social perspective, as public spaces for recreation and sports activities, regardless of the environmental and economic benefits they can provide from a sustainable development perspective. The planning of urban green areas requires a set of conditions in order to be successful, among which are: an updated regulatory framework, adequate financial resources, technical knowledge of the appropriate plant species and the effective participation of the community. However, without a complete and classified inventory of the existing green areas, any planning is unfeasible. Therefore, this paper presents the first stage of the study of urban green areas in a city of the State of Baja California, Mexico, developing firstly, a review of the regulatory framework and a redefinition of the concept of urban green areas that takes into account the basic dimensions of sustainability, and on the other hand, it proposes a general classification of urban green areas that includes all types of open spaces with vegetation: both for public and private use, subdivided into systems and subsystems, which were the basis for the identification, classification and quantification of urban green areas, using Quickbird multispectral images of 2.6 m resolution and applying the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) using IDRISI software, and data were integrated in a GIS; finally, the results and discussion are presented.

The urban-rural interface has usually been studied from the point of view of cities with different sectoral interests and very little from rural perspectives. Nevertheless, these kinds of areas need to be studied from both points of view and from comprehensive approaches that could reflect their complexity. Thus the work is oriented to make a comparative analysis of two main approaches to dealing with the rural-urban interface in a Latin-American context: one coming from towns and the other from the countryside, where both of them include the sustainable and a territorial perspective of development. The analysis has taken into account economic, social, environmental and political-institutional issues, as well as urban-rural interactions. Results underline some contributions of such approaches to theory and practice of planning and management of these spaces; such as the value of a complex systems view, planning in different spatial scales and time scenarios, the territory as a support of socio-economic and environmental processes and the role of local actors in this transformation. To conclude, rural development has been arising as an emergent field where medium and small size towns play an important role in linking production with local and global markets and enforcing rural-urban relationships in urban systems.

Initiating around the eighties, the academic training of landscape architects in Mexico is quite recent compared with the tradition in Europe and the U.S. Also new, is the development of landscape research conducted mainly by geographers, urban planners and other professionals trained in natural sciences, whose work is primarily oriented to land use management for urban development and conservation of natural resources or cultural heritage purposes. However, the issue of the cultural landscape in Mexico has been little explored and lacks any integrated and multidisciplinary methodology to bring together social, cultural and natural processes for study. Therefore, this work focuses on the presentation of an appropriate methodology to address the issue of the evolving cultural landscape of the Valley of Mexicali. This work has been developed into three stages: characterization, multiple assessment of landscape and integration of strategies for their management. Thus progress will be presented for the characterization of physical units, landscape components through pictures, visual and spatial patterns of landscape that structure the region and its settlements. As a partial result it was found that multi-valued zones visually and spatially exist in the Mexicali Valley, as well as activities that give character and differentiate it from other agricultural areas of Baja California.

Human settlements worldwide have experienced environmental problems as a result of population growth, an increase in productive activities and low financial capacity of municipalities to provide adequate infrastructure and public services. At the local level, problems of water, soil and air pollution, as well as, land use changes have arisen due to the expansion of urban agglomerations. Regionally, there have been negative impacts on watersheds, ecosystems and biodiversity. Globally, the world is experiencing climate change, the reduction of the ozone layer and the increase of natural disasters. The situation has posed a challenge in terms of urban and regional planning, especially for metropolitan areas and medium-sized cities. The purpose of this study is to present an alternative to integrate environmental sustainability into metropolitan planning in Mexico, specifically applied to the Metropolitan Area of Mexicali, Baja California. Therefore the Environmental Sustainability Agenda has focused on three objectives: first, identifying the weaknesses of the existing environmental and human settlements legal framework; second, developing an environmental assessment and; third, designing policies, strategies and indicators to implement institutional monitoring of environmental programmes. The results were obtained by conducting surveys, regional community workshops, and reviewing previous research. Lastly, this study concludes with six sectoral programs: water, air, solid wastes, green areas, soils and physical pollution and six transversal Sustainable Development and Planning VI 267programs that have effects on environmental education, health, climate change, environmental management and the legal framework.

The city of Mexicali has 2.1 m² public green areas per inhabitant while the national regulation establishes 10 m² per inhabitant and the World Health Organization establishes 9 m² per inhabitant, therefore there is an important deficit of public green areas. This article presents a methodological proposal for planning urban green areas and its application in Mexicali. The approach is based on a sustainability perspective in which green areas are not only considered from the social point of view as recreational and sporting facilities, but also as urban elements that can contribute to environmental improvement as well as to reducing the global warming effect by capturing carbon dioxide, which is a greenhouse effect gas. The methodological proposal is composed of five phases: organization, inventory, assessment, strategy and management and the development of six groups of components: the physical-urban, technological, environmental, financial-economical, legal-regulatory, and public participation. The green area inventory and its assessment were done according to a classification in twelve subsystems using a Quickbird satellite image with a 2.6 m resolution and data was integrated in a geographical information system (Mapinfo). Criterion is presented at the end of this paper for urban green area allocation, according to the social demands of population and the environmental needs as a result of the carbon dioxide emission by the combustion of fuels from automotive vehicles in the city. In addition, several strategies and instruments were defined for the creation, improvement, and preservation of such areas.