No abstract

Urban agriculture (UA) is steadily gaining supporters worldwide, and this is partly because constantly growing urban populations recognize the need to increase food production and promote a healthy diet. UA can also generate extra income, promote socialization leading to valorisation of urban areas. Nevertheless, UA faces several challenges, including limited available space, stressed natural resources, pollution in a context characterized by climate change and new consumption patterns. At the same time, if UA is practiced in the same way as other forms of agriculture, it may have some undesirable environmental impacts on urban areas. The use of indicators can provide decision makers with a tool to evaluate the sustainable insertion of agriculture in cities. This work aims to propose a minimum set of indicators as the basis for an index to assess progress of urban vegetable production towards sustainability. Nineteen urban sustainability indexes, composed of several indicators founded in the literature and already used by several institutions, were analysed. These indexes were broken down into a set of 1579 indicators. Analysis of the relevancy to issues such as food, energy, water, land and pollution, and the selection based on the criteria of being measurable, sensitive to stress, predictable, anticipatory, controllable, integrative, responsive and stable, led to a 26 basic indicators selection. These are proposed as the basis for an innovative UA sustainability index. This will be built based on the Delphi method and is intended to support communities in establishing sustainable and resilient cities.

The ancient Roman Bridge, 2,000 years old, is located on the old Via Traiana route, three kilometers far from the town of Canosa (Apulia Region), and for many centuries it was the connection between northern and southern part of the Apulia Region along the Adriatic coast. It has an imposing structure stonework, with a donkey back shape, built with five round arches supported by piers sustained by rostrums. During the Second World War, a concrete access way was realized in order to let the British and American army tank pass through the bridge. The "Municipal Plan of the Tratturi" qualifies the area as "sheep trails or path" that preserves the original consistency or that can be at the same renovated. Aim of the research is the requalification of the study area through analyses, plan and restructuring the ancient routes. In this study, the current status of the area is analyzed in detail and the inconsistency of the interventions is highlighted. The project proposal provides for new tourism paths equipped with cycle/pedestrian tracks and small resting and refreshment areas, intermodal exchange car parks and management structures, allowing the creation of a green tourist-cultural route.