The paper addresses the issue of the concurrent use of coastal areas for military training and civil activities, namely tourism. In the paper, starting from the consideration of publicly owned assets as ‘semi-commons’, we propose a method based on the comparison of planning instruments related to the different uses, and try to model them in a grid, where different weights and degrees of evaluation can be considered, in order to promote, rather than blocking, possible activities, compatible with concurrent use. The military areas in Sardinia (region and island, Italy) are around 234 km², which constitutes 60% of the national surface affected by military easements. This situation is due to its geographic position, considered centrality in the Mediterranean for strategic reasons. This contribution evaluates the performance of the Local Coastline Plan (LCP) and the Site management plan of Community Interest (SCI) in conditions of military constraint. The case study is the municipality of Villaputzu South Sardinia, Italy), where an important coastal military easement and the use of the coast for recreational tourism purposes coexist together through specific planning, a consequence of institutional agreements between the Municipal Administration of Villaputzu and the Ministry of Defense. The idea is considering the concurrent possible land uses guaranteed by the different planning instruments, instead of focusing, as it is generally the rule, on the sum of constraints provided by the laws. The local coastline plan has been identified as the ideal planning tool, which addresses the co-existence of apparently opposite land uses and interests, as those expressed by the local municipal planning and those expressed by the military. An evaluation of the congruence of the specific objectives of the LCP and SCI shows how their combined action favors the environmental enhancement of Sardinia, contributing to the formation of ecosystem services, even in particular conditions arising from military easements. These are sites that evolve from ‘anticommons’ to ‘semicommons’. In fact, the military release process in Sardinia, together with the promiscuous military and civil use, activates unique governance policies of their kind that find a significant field of application in Sardinia to guarantee sustainable renewal of economic development of the ‘semi-commons’ awaiting to become ‘commons’.

The new demand for rurality raises new issues: it is no longer a question of sustaining a traditional agricultural model based exclusively on productivity and profit maximisation, but rather agriculture strongly oriented towards the production of non-commodity outputs that very often have the characteristics of externalities or public goods. Based on these assumptions, the paper intends to frame the role of multifunctional agriculture for the development of peri-urban areas looking in particular to the agricultural parks phenomenon, in which innovative and multifunctional agriculture is practiced (with environmental, landscape, and social functions), to asses if they can represent a strategic resource for the tourist enhancement of territories on the edge of urban and rural areas. With this perspective, two Italian case studies, Parco agricolo di Ciaculli (Palermo and Parco agricolo Sud Milano (Milano), have been analyzed highlighting their main characteristics and under which conditions they can play the role of tourism development driver.