A Methodology for Analyzing the Role of Environmental Vulnerability in Urban and Metropolitan-Scale Peripheralization Processes

Due to the global urbanization trends and increasing poverty, there is a risk that peripheralization processes can generate social, building, and urban fabric decay in cities, regardless of their proximity to centres and of municipal limits. The identification of the areas most at risk, in which to foresee priority interventions in territorial and urban planning, cannot fail to consider the environmental inequalities that can exacerbate the vulnerability to these processes. So, the aim of this work is to define a methodology to evaluate and map environmental vulnerability to peripheralization risk at urban and metropolitan scale, in the Italian geographical context. Starting from the definition of potential degradation factors affecting urban environment, the model defines an Environmental Vulnerability composite index, obtained from the aggregation of three indexes which measure such factors: Energy Performance Vulnerability; Air Pollutants Vulnerability; Urban Waste Vulnerability. The composite index thus structured, classified according to five levels of intensity, allows to map the environmental vulnerability to peripheralization risk in a large urban area, in order to refine the identification of priority areas of intervention.