From Ecosystem Service Evaluation to Landscape Design: The Project of a Rural Peri-urban Park in Chieri (Italy)

The concept of Ecosystem Services (ES), namely the benefits that people obtain from ecosystems, clearly highlights the added value that environment and landscape conservation provides for the society and the economy and, more generally, for human well-being. In the last decade, several studies dealt with the needs and ways of integrating ES evaluation into spatial planning policies to foster sustainable development. More recently, the relationship between ES evaluation and landscape design has been increasingly investigated too, and ES have been proposed as a conceptual framework for addressing landscape architecture towards multifunctionality objectives. This chapter presents the first outcomes of an applied research that assumed ES evaluation—understood both as biophysical assessment and economic valuation—as a tool to sustain landscape design choices at the local scale. The study evaluated ES in a rural peri-urban area of Chieri (Turin, Italy), to support the project of a rural-recreational park. In the envisaged park, agricultural, natural and recreational areas coexist and a more sustainable relationship between the dense city and its peri-urban context is promoted. ES evaluation allowed to highlight at the site-scale the ES performance of alternative design choices and to draft possible pathways for the implementation of Payment for Ecosystem Services schemes.