<p><strong>Abstract.</strong> Landscape is not a sum of elements to be juxtaposed in a paper or a digital space. It is a complex system of relationships among components that have evolved over time. It is not a sum of material permanencies, more or less recognizable and placeable in space, but an interweaving of economic, social, religious and political meanings that link permanencies and give them value.</p><p>How to represent these relationships from existing geographic or historical databases? How can we illustrate the co-evolution between nature and culture that has given form to today’s landscape? And how to allow at the same time to update data and their relationships?</p><p>Through the comparison among examples taken from local participative experiences (ecomuseum community maps) and others directly managed and produced by the Authors (itinerary maps), the contribution reflects on these main critical issues: landscape representation problems, data collecting and updating, information sharing. The main results show that the data digitalization and georeferencing can help to illustrate and understand tangible and intangible characteristics of landscape and overcome the gaps from a sharing mapping procedure with a bottom-up approach and the point of view by the experts with a top-down approach. On the contrary, the digital representation of landscape data shows another set of problems that currently are mainly solved in traditional ways. The paper will also deal with these aspects.</p>

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Nowadays the trend of urban gardening can be observed in many parts of the world. This phenomenon responds to the demand of rurality and the requalification of abandoned urban green areas expressed by city residents. Recently, many researchers have investigated about different types of urban gardening but mostly referring to English speaking developed countries (Guitart et al. 2012). To grasp the worldwide trend of urban gardening, this paper aims to compare urban gardening experiences in Rome and Tokyo. In Italy, the analysis is conducted through a direct investigation while the Japanese experience has been analysed through secondary data. The study of these two quite different metropolitan contexts helps to understand: (i) motivations on why urban residents need to grow food by themselves; (ii) types of ecosystem services (i.e. safeguard of agricultural land, food culture, production system, leisure model, environmental education, social cohesion) provided to stakeholders (Langemeyer et al. 2018;Speak et al. 2015). By comparing the two areas in Europe and Asia, we found urban residents' interests in self-harvesting in common. Yet, there were differences in the form of urban gardening. Urban gardening in Rome is characterized by voluntary community activities, while Tokyo has commercial services to provide opportunities to not only those who have eagerness to grow vegetables, but also those who have less time and skills of growing plants.

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