Agricultural park in Europe as tool for agriurban policies and design: a critical overview

The “operational category” of Peri-Urban Agricultural Park (PAP) seems to have embodied in Europe, at least in some countries, a shared and commonly aknowledged role as protection and active tool for agri-environmental periurban areas planning enhancement. That especially considering the multifaceted urbanization patterns that entail growing theoretical and operational discomfort to assume urban and rural as strictly separate domains. Notwithstanding such a categor, alongside with its applications, shows a wide-ranging, although generally fruitful, set of regional/local practices, differences and approaches and, not rarely, it encounters some opposition, especially on behalf of farmers, mainly related to the “defensive” concept of park. Starting from this backcloth the article focuses on some experiences, documents, studies, seminal contributions on the matter, with the aim to render the main features of a shared PAP figure, concept or definition as a viable tool to jointly achieve urban environment improvement and peri-urban green spaces active protection. This, alongside with a selective survey of the main European cases and local contexts where the PAP figure was conceived and implemented. Finally the article –starting from the theoretical and cases survey- points out and assesses the values and potentialities that PAP seems to entail in supporting integrated policies and innovative design practices for the agri-urban areas. That, especially, in calling for integrated planning practices and design initiatives for the prime farmland enhancement and biodiversity protection, settlement resilience and local integrated endogenous development.