AREE DISMESSE ED ORTI URBANI: UN “VALORE SOCIALE COMPLESSO” NELLE CITTÀ Abandoned areas and urban gardens: a "complex social value" in the cities

The contribution to the welfare of citizens that urban gardens can generate represents a "social use-value". The social value of horticulture in cities can be expressed by means of an appropriate set of indicators describing the produced values. The proposed work, which is the result of an interdisciplinary collaboration, highlights the potentiality of abandoned and degraded urban areas, and intends to outline a model for the assessment of the social value generated by the introduction of "urban gardens". The proposed model can be utilised for selecting the most suitable areas for the use in question, for monitoring the effects of policies for urban gardens on urban sustainability, and for constructing a ranking of sustainable cities, with the aim of triggering virtuous processes of emulation.