ABSTRACT
This work is aimed at stimulating the adoption of advanced tools of GIS (Burrough 1986) to improve the reading and interpreting of the territory for urban planning purposes. The basic idea is to proceed to define a suitable way to formalize and represent spatial dependent functions for territory (or landscape) qualification by recognizing, from existing maps, those themes describing, directly or indirectly, the conditioning factors. This makes possible a change detection analysis between consequent periods, allowing planners to evaluate and quantify (both in strength and direction) the forces that drive urban growth. According to this purpose the proposed methodology is mainly in charge of generating graphical representations (maps) explicitly showing the dynamics of urban expansion towards rural areas. It is worth stressing that the main goal of this work is to show how GIS approaches operate effectively in this context; it is not the authors’ intention to face and solve the problem of which landscape quality function is the most suitable. The one proposed during the tests should be seen as an example aimed at showing how the procedure runs. From this point of view, GIS can represent a useful device in the hands of planners to make their decisions more objective and their plans clearer. This is obtained by mapping space dependent landscape quality functions whose definition is strictly related to information derivable from existing maps. Their numerical nature permits us to consider them as universal descriptors.
