Ecosystem Services and Territorial Resilience: The Role of Green and Blue Infrastructure

Responding to the new environmental, ecological, and social emergencies requires a shift in strategies and urban design models. In the contexts of sustainability and resilience, green and blue infrastructure (GBI) is a wide-ranging concept that can help overcome the usual dichotomies of urban growth versus green or the built environment versus nature. This provides different benefits, both environmental and ecological and social and economic. In urban contexts, green spaces play a strategic role due to the number of typologies and functions that vary from neighborhood spaces to green, play, and sports facilities to protected areas of territorial scale. In this way, the planning and design of GBI take on the triple objective of regenerating fragile and degraded ecosystems from an environmental, social, and economic point of view. Focusing on this assumption, we describe how the GBI that develops along the axe of the Stura di Lanzo river in a multiscalar mosaic of soils at both local and territorial levels can determine options for the ecosystem quality of the metropolitan area of northern Turin. We suppose that mapping ecosystem services (based on a correct land use/land cover design) can support designing new urban and regional plans to improve resilience.