AGRICULTURE, AGRARIAN LANDSCAPE AND TERRITORIAL PLANNING: CHARACTERIZATION OF THE TERRITORY AND HYPOTHESIS OF DEVELOPMENT IN SANTA FLAVIA (PALERMO) - ITALY

Today, complying with national and regional legislature, territorial planning in Italy must guarantee a careful management of the territory. Therefore, it cannot omit the support of environmental studies (geological studies, agricultural-forest studies, E.I.A., S.E.A., etc.) that define new and different perspectives to be assumed in landscape analyses and project choices. The present case study, carried out in Sicily with the contribution of different professionals, takes place in this context. The research is located in the territory of Santa Flavia (Palermo), a small coastal town divided between an economy based on tourism and one based on traditional fishing and agriculture. Through agricultural-forest study methodologies, the analyses so far conducted have carefully examined the municipal territory so as to identify possible actions of restoration, protection or exploitation of the forest and landscape resources. To reach this objective a methodology of data elaboration has been adopted that distinguishes the territory in "landscape unities" homogeneous regarding use and need of planning actions. The research reveals a territory possessing a rich naturalistic, historical and environmental patrimony, about 70% of which covered with agrarian cultivations that deeply characterize the landscape. The analyses in detail underline the extreme fragmentation of landed property that, with the abandon of citrus cultivations and the pressure of thirty years of indiscriminate urbanization, disfigures the territory. Therefore, striving not to lose any peculiar historical-cultural, landscape and productive characteristic of the local countryside, some useful hypotheses have been formulated in order to exploit or re-qualify local agriculture, not only in terms of cultural re-conversion but also of alternative uses of agrarian properties.