Among the most significant impacts related to the spread of settlements and the densification of urban areas, the reduction in the availability of public green spaces plays a central role in the definition of livable cities, in terms of the environment and social cohesion, interaction, and equality. In the framework of target 11.7 of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) 11, the United Nations has established the objective of ensuring universal, safe, and inclusive access to public spaces by 2030, for women, children, the elderly, and people with disabilities. This study proposes the evaluation of this objective for the urban area of the 14 Italian metropolitan cities, as defined by EUROSTAT and adopted by the United Nations and the Nature Restoration Law (NRL). A methodology based on open-source data and network analysis tools is tested for the provision of an unprecedented mapping of the availability and accessibility to green urban public spaces, which shows that less than 30% of metropolitan city residents have access to a green space within 300 m on foot, according to OpenStreetMap data (less than one in five for the Urban Atlas data). Furthermore, a critical analysis on the geometric and semantic definition of green urban public spaces adopted by the main European and international tools is carried out, which underlines the strategic role of crowdsourcing but also the need for mapping rules that make the data more consistent with the monitoring objectives set at the institutional level.

For the first time in human history, over half of the world’s population lives in urban areas. This rapid growth makes cities more vulnerable, increasing the need to monitor urban dynamics and its sustainability. The aim of this work is to examine the spatial extent of urban areas, to identify the urban–rural continuum, to understand urbanization processes, and to monitor Sustainable Development Goal 11. In this paper, we apply the methodology developed by the European Commission-Joint Research Center for the classification of the degree of urbanization of the Italian territory, using the ISPRA land consumption map and the ISTAT population data. The analysis shows that the availability of detailed and updated spatialized population data is essential to calculate SDG indicator 11.3.1, which assesses the ratio of land consumption rate to population growth rate. Three new indicators are also proposed to describe the main trends in urban sprawl, analyzing the spatial distribution of land consumption in terms of infill and settlement dispersion. The research shows good results in identifying class boundaries and describing the Italian urbanized landscape, highlighting the need for more detailed spatialized demographic data. The classification obtained lends itself to a variety of applications, such as monitoring land consumption, settlement dynamics, or the urban heat islands, and assessing the presence and state of green infrastructures in the urban context, driving the development of policies in urban areas toward sustainable choices focused on urban regeneration.

The United Nations Global Agenda for Sustainable Development, particularly through Goal 2, simultaneously seeks to end hunger, achieve food security, improve nutrition and promote sustainable agriculture. Therefore, it is crucial to focus on the agricultural production system and on consumption conditions. This means that ‘access’ to food should be determined with respect to the three dimensions of economic, physical and solidarity access to a quantity of food that fulfils both people’s nutritional needs and environmentally responsible consumption patterns. In Italy, 9.9% of the total population, i.e., six million people, live in a state of food insecurity. In Rome, 9.4% of the population lives in a condition of material deprivation, and applications for Citizens’ Income have increased, as well as food aids which amounted to EUR 20 million in 2020. The relationships between the cost of healthy and sustainable diets (which would cost 60% more than a staple diet) and the increasing economic difficulties people are facing, have prompted a focus on the multidimensional nature of food security, with particular emphasis on people’s ability to access food. In this paper, analyzing the Metropolitan City of Rome (Italy) as a case study, we present a pilot and innovative work on an affordability index to healthy and sustainable diet. A geospatial analysis highlights areas where economic difficulties in accessing food overlap with the shortage/absence of food retail outlets and with a lack of solidarity networks (e.g., civil society food distribution initiatives), allowing a new concept to come into focus, namely the blacked-out food areas. This concept helps to identify those areas in which people are socially excluded and cannot enjoy the same substantive food-related choices as people in other areas. The research outcomes provide insights into the geographical areas and neighborhoods characterized by critical access to healthy and sustainable food, providing crucial information for the planning and implementation of targeted social policies to tackle food insecurity.

Developing appropriate tools to understand and protect ecosystems and the services they provide is of unprecedented importance. This work describes the activity performed by ISPRA for the mapping of the types of ecosystems and the evaluation of their related ecosystem services, to meet the needs of the “ecosystem extent account” and “ecosystem services physical account” activities envisaged by the SEEA-EA framework. A map of the types of ecosystems is proposed, obtained by integrating the main Copernicus data with the ISPRA National Land Consumption Map, according to the MAES (Mapping and Assessment of Ecosystems and their Services) classification system. The crop production and carbon stock values for 2018 were then calculated and aggregated with respect to each ecosystem. The ecosystem accounting was based on the land cover map produced by ISPRA integrating, according to an EAGLE compliant classification system, the same Copernicus and National input data used for mapping the types of ecosystems. The analysis shows the importance of an integrated reading of the main monitoring tools and the advantages in terms of compatibility and comparability, with a view to enhancing the potential of Copernicus land monitoring instruments also in the context of ecosystem accounting activities.

Urbanisation processes have led to the emergence of functional and formal hybrids, blurring and fragmenting the traditional boundaries between urban and rural areas. Agricultural parks have emerged as a planning tool to govern these hybrid areas between ‘countryside’ and the ‘city’, as well as to promote sustainable land use and community development. This paper, analysing the Metropolitan City of Rome (Italy) as a case study, illustrates an innovative pilot methodology for identifying the area of an Agricultural Park and, in particular, the area of the Rome Metropolitan Agricultural Park (MAP), a policy proposal for the metropolitan city. The aim of the article is twofold: to analyse the multifunctionality of farms in the periurban area of Rome to highlight the types of goods and services on which the relationship between farms and the metropolitan population is based and to expose the methodological path on which the MAP policy proposal was developed. A geospatial analysis, using the National Land Consumption Map (LCM) and the CORINE Land Cover (CLC), highlights the main agricultural areas and evaluates their quality. Isochronous curves assess the accessibility, and the GHS population grid (GHS-POP) defines the catchment areas. This approach, building on the 15 min city framework, has analysed the multifunctional farms and the types of goods and services offered to the population. A total of 91,656 hectares were identified as potential geographical areas of the Metropolitan Agricultural Park that could serve nearly 1 million inhabitants between rural and urban areas of Rome. The research highlights its characteristics in terms of the role of multifunctional farms, Alternative Food Networks, and the relationships between consumers and producers.