This paper presents research which has defined a new typology of urban patterns (sprinkling), different from the internationally recognized standard urban sprawl, as well as various indicators that have been implemented to measure sprinkling. It is important to highlight that the damage caused to the environment and communities by urban sprinkling is much more serious and irreversible than that notoriously caused by urban sprawl. The paper introduces the difficult methodological and planning aspects of retrofitting (de-sprinkling), a true challenge for land management. We argue that even partial inversion of many negative effects is impossible in the short term. Only medium- to long-term, organized, and politically coordinated programs can tackle the various issues associated with sprinkling.

The increasingly fast pace in urban conversion of land over the past 50 years in Italy is a phenomenon that is still difficult to quantify reliably owing to the chronic lack of knowledge at every territorial level, from national to municipal. This article describes the results of a study on the features of urbanization in the 1950s in the peninsular regions of Central Italy, based on uniform historical maps of the entire country. The historical data were compared from a qualitative and quantitative viewpoint with the present-day geography of settlements. Interesting information has emerged on possible significant thresholds in the relationship between demography and urban use of land, in addition to data on landscape effects to be construed as signs of specific trends underway today and scarcely taken into account by land management tools.

The aim of this paper is to examine available homogenous data on urban conversion of land in Western European countries and determine whether they are suitable to make an international comparison between land policies and management behaviour at the local level. This paper provides some results obtained from currently available information, but it stresses major data production criticalities which hinder the performance of comparable and reliable overall statistical studies. Conclusions stress the need for greater detail in the production of primary data on the features and magnitude of territorial urbanisation in Europe, as the EEA is doing for main cities. Moreover, this paper includes some remarks on the contents of the preliminary documents of EU soil directive. In particular, it focuses on the issue of urban transformation thresholds over time, a topic that has already been tackled by some northern European countries, however using techniques which cannot be applied as they are to all other countries.