Urban greenery as a resource for urban environment

In many suburban districts, urban greenery is an important component in terms of quantity and quality in the definition of the urban landscape. The benefits on the environment, on the quality of human life and the economic repercussions on the surrounding built heritage make the natural environment a collective asset for the entire ecosystem. However, the lack of human and economic resources on which today's public administrations can rely makes the management of such spaces problematic, often transforming them into poorly cared for and unused places. In this regard, maintenance activities, such as mowing and pruning, as well as requiring a series of continuous and costly interventions produce a significant amount of plant material to be disposed of constituting a monetary and environmental cost for the community. In order to define new operational scenarios able to increase the environmental, social and economic value by reducing the relative costs, the flows of plant material are analyzed through the case study of the "Le Vallette" district in the city of Turin. Applying the Material Flow Analysis (MFA) methodology to the individual green heritage management activities, a model is proposed that is able to quantify the producibility of annual vegetable waste in order to compare different scenarios of its reuse. In this way, the concept of urban greenery is reinterpreted from a landscape element to an economic and environmental resource.