An effective response to the current international and EU guidelines of limiting land take and desirable reversal of the phenomenon, is possible for Italy only if it succeeds in setting up centralized regional direction structures for settlement transformations and working on operational planning tools. Precisely at this level, a different control of classic urban planning parameters will have to be expressed, centering attention on the relationship between built-up areas and property areas (coverage ratio) and orienting it to support urban design from a soil-saving perspective. This should apply in all homogeneous zones covered in Italian planning, with a decisive revision of current models. The paper examines the possibilities of technical action in this direction by simulating land-saving solutions corresponding to the progressive reduction of areas committed to construction and formulating proposals to strategically better regulate urbanization arrangements. The method used is based on the implementation of a set of indicators from different institutional databases. These relate the size of the average land area used to locate the individual buildings to the residential loads of the buildings, showing in both aspects an extraordinarily low average density that causes extensive land take phenomena.

The paper aims to analyze the macro landscape profiles of Western and Eastern European countries in search of affinities or evolutionary signs that may lead to defining lines of scenario. The landscape mosaic is notoriously very different in different countries, but several common elements can be recognized that emerge from some specifically cut surveys and are not intuitive. In particular, it is of interest to investigate the different configurations of urban patterns together with those of other key landscape units, such as agricultural, forest and semi-natural, trying to ascertain affinities. Interpretive help in this regard is also thought to come from the survey of environmental protection, investigated through national and community instruments, which is a very valid indicator for understanding the level and quality of land management toward which a country is trending. Awarenesses acquired in Western Europe for many years already testify that the settlement development patterns followed in the last half century cannot be considered entirely positive and, therefore, it would be helpful if other Eastern Bloc countries were able to perceive the pathological aspects and not repeat them in their trajectories of, albeit legitimate, economic and social growth. The method used sought to demonstrate the dependence of settlement growth patterns on economic characteristics, but also revealed some unexpected differences in environmental protection policies.