Planning for sustainable spatial development : principles and application

Space - and in particular land use - forms the geographical projection of the dispersion of human activities. In the light of the environmental externalities of these activities, space demonstrates also the spatial dispersion of environmental decay. It is clear that space is thus also the geographical platform of conflicting issues in land use management and physical planning, in particular in an urbanized world. In the past decades a vvide variety of decision support methods and expert systems has been developed to cope with the need for sustainable spatial development. The paper will give an overview of recent issues in this area with a particular view to urban sustainability. It will also offer a survey of recently developed decision support methods for sustainable land use management, in particular multicriteria methods. The approach will be illustrated by an empirical application to sustainable city planning of the Italian city of Cremona, seen from the perspective of sustainable development. The paper will be concluded with some retrospective and prospective research remarks.