Design handbook on Urban Green Infrastructure: a challenge of TURaS project

It is now widely recognized as the answer to sustainable urbanization and to the needed control of the soil consumption is the design and planning of the so-called "green infrastructure". The concept of green infrastructure is not only linked to environmental and landscape themes but has now assumed a nature more strictly socio-economic as well as cultural-historical, to ensure a high environmental quality level in urban areas. Nowadays, the key challenge in the most cities of the world, that involves urban planners, managers and designers, is to devise strategies that promote the creation of new green spaces and maintaining the existing ones to offer new opportunities and services to citizens and, at the same time, to decrease the continuous urban sprawl and to deter the soil conversion of the green belt in housing or industries. These are the challenges that are being addressed by the TURaS Project, presented in this paper.