Parks and territory. New perspective in planning and organization

Park planning not only refers to parks. In most cases, an extended territorial context influences and is influenced by policies connected to the planning and management organization of protected areas. If the park requires a territorial context to work its way out of claustrophobic, "island" visions, the territory itself has much to learn from the successes and failures of policies governing protected areas. This volume also responds to the wide debate that developed on this theme at the international seminar "Italian protected areas reaching the 2100 vision: strategies and actions. New organizational and planning perspectives", organized in Visso in November 2009 (University of Camerino, University of Macerata and University of Sassari). The meeting included the participation of the US National Park Service, the largest and oldest organization dedicated to the planning and management of national parks. In the first part of the book, we investigate the separation from urban planning and territorial policies that has traditionally characterized policies for parks and protected areas. We highlight: the connections between natural and cultural resources; the integration or separation between parks and cities; and the role of the landscape in planning interpretations of relationships between the parks and the territory. From the methodological point of view, park planning requires measurement with other bodies of knowledge such as ecology, geology, economics, and the closer examination of some crucial problems in the current debate on conservation/transformation, such as relationships between local and global interests, natural and cultural values, property and environmental rights, evaluation and planning, and rules and cooperation. Some case studies looking at a landscape interpretation of areas of environmental prestige in the Carpathians and eastern Alps provide the first indications in defining a model of sustainable mobility in the fruition of tourism in mountain areas (international research project SEE - "Access2Mountain"). In the second part of the book, topics regarding the organization and management of protected areas are examined, along with their relationship to the performance of the protected areas and with global perspectives of sustainable, or even responsible, socio-economic development.