Enhancing heritage landscape performance through multifunctional designed ecologies. Lessons from Florence

Peri-urban heritage landscapes currently face major threats: growing competition of non-agricultural land use, uncontrolled urbanization, abandonment of rural settlements and general intensification of anthropogenic activities which are negatively affecting these valuable and fragile ecosystems. Over the last decade, researchers and practitioners have been acknowledging the value of the multiple benefits provided by peri-urban heritage landscapes – slow-food, fibre and building materials, rural livelihoods, well-being and natural medicine, energy and biodiversity, sustainable tourism, cultural and educational opportunities. A variety of frameworks and terms have developed to describe visions which call for the synergic integration of agricultural, environmental and cultural outcomes. Green Infrastructure, in particular, has become a scientific and practical approach to embed networks of nature-based solutions. A project recently carried out in Florence (I) has developed a landscape design which, starting from improved biodiversity as a desirable target, and levering on the long established geo-historical and socio-economical dimensions of the peri-urban heritage landscape, has determined effective convergences between agricultural production (commodity outputs), natural capital protection and provision of leisure and other cultural opportunities (non-commodity outputs), in order to reduce land-use conflict, advance urbanites’ quality of life and encourage long-lasting stakeholders’ engagement towards stronger urban resilience.