Traditional land-use planning models have proven inadequate to address contemporary issues in sustainable development and protection governance. In recent years, new ‘performance based’ approaches that integrate ecosystem services (ES) provided via green infrastructure (GI) into traditional spatial planning models have been proven to reach a higher level of environmental performance, necessary to improve quality of life for all people. In Italy, there are no mandatory planning instruments to design and manage GI, which still remains a component of the traditional land-use plan. Here, the development of urban green spaces (UGS) based on ‘quantitative assessment’ is not suitable for guaranteeing the supply of ES. In addition, the scarcity of financial resources to develop ‘green standards’, as prescribed in the land-use plan to strategically design the GI, is an issue for most Italian public administrations. The paper provides the results of a test case conducted in a public green area of the city of Ancona, where the experimentation of a diversified maintenance strategy of an urban lawn significantly reduced the management cost and improved the environmental performance of green spaces. The identification of a unified management strategy to be applied to all the public UGS can help to achieve better results in support of sustainability, to redesign the continuity of GI and to develop strategies for future urban green master plans.

Rural areas in Italy and Europe, while vital to agriculture and tourism, face transport limitations that restrict access to essential services, education, and jobs, deepening socio-economic exclusion. Transport policies often prioritize urban centers, leaving rural areas underfunded and with inadequate options, making daily mobility and economic development challenging. This study examines good practices from different EU countries, using a holistic case study approach, combining a literature review and analysis of implemented projects. A more nuanced understanding of successful rural mobility solutions throughout Europe is supported by this mixed technique. This hybrid analytical approach facilitates the identification of effective good practices that produce innovation in social engagement and inclusivity. This study’s conclusions highlight the potential of customized mobility solutions with inclusivity at their heart to effectively solve the particular difficulties encountered by rural communities. In contrast to urban areas, which have diverse and well-developed transportation networks, rural populations frequently face a lack of mobility options. This study demonstrates how tailored strategies, like delivering services right to people’s doorsteps, repurposing pre-existing infrastructure, or providing volunteer rides that link an isolated population to other communities, can close accessibility gaps that have long kept these populations apart.

Regional single-and multi-risk assessment should account for territorial characteristics and landuse conditions. While preserving hazard-specific features, multi-layer risk analysis approach should hence include user dynamics over time, from daily to seasonal scales, impacting exposure ("how many?") and vulnerability ("of which types?") of users. Moreover, harmonized integration of single-risk analyses is needed, acknowledging that risks may occur independently or asynchronously. This work provides a multi-layer, single-to-multi-risk assessment methodology, explicitly building on user dynamics as a common analytical base. The approach is applied to the Marche Region (Italy), adopting the municipal scale as the primary analysis level to ensure consistency with operational planning, interpretation and regional-scale coordination. For each considered hazard, single-risk assessments are combined with user exposure and vulnerability. Key performance indicators are then calculated and normalized to enable crosshazard comparison, identify groups of municipalities by risk-user profiles through clustering, and derive multirisk indices under representative temporal scenarios (i.e. daytime/nighttime, working/holiday periods). Results demonstrate how user dynamics (i.e. commuting, tourism) significantly influences single-to-multirisk, revealing spatially homogeneous patterns and scenario-dependent criticalities, typically underestimated under static assumptions. The proposed user-based framework supports: harmonized multi-risk comparisons across scenarios; identification of municipalities with critical risk-user conditions; informed selection of mitigation strategies, including land-use policies ("statically" defined by urban planning using critical reference scenarios) and adaptive emergency planning (fully based on "dynamic" conditions). It hence provides knowledge basis for risk-sensitive land-use planning, typically grounded in stable reference scenarios, and for emergency planning approaches that require the explicit consideration of time-dependent exposure and vulnerability dynamics.