Green infrastructure and urban resilience

The growth of urban population, moving from rural to urban areas (UNFPA 2011), is going to increase soil loss and the exploitation of natural resources in city's environment. One of the main impacts of cities growth is the rise of greenhouse gases and the direct outgrowth of global warming (IPCC 2013). In order to this, the soil loss reduction is one of the common goal fixed for facing climate change, so that existing urban natural soils represents a key opportunity for creating new green infrastructures by which strengthening the resilience of the urban environment (EU White Paper EU, 2009). The paper reports the first advances of applied research, done by scholars of the University of Naples Federico II-DIARC - in 2014-2015, dealing with a design oriented methodology for data collecting and data analysis in order to improve green infrastructures in urban areas. The study aims at empirically defining criteria for selecting the core areas of urban green infrastructure in the case study of Naples, Italy, focusing specially on those areas consistent with agricultural uses.