Resumen

SERRANO GINE, David. Suburban landscape assessment applied to urban planning. Case study in Barcelona Metropolitan Region. Invest. Geog [online]. 2015, n.88, pp.109-121. ISSN 2448-7279.  https://doi.org/10.14350/rig.45090.

Landscape's quality plays an important role in economic activities localisation, mainly in extraordinary or reputed sceneries. In degraded, everyday and suburban landscapes, landscape's quality is also deep important because indirectly determines where activities may be located, for example using selected viewsheds to discard impacting activities. European landscape convention gives remarkable importance to everyday landscapes, mentioning them in its Preamble, Article 2 and 6. The aim of this paper is to show a proceeding especially planned to asses landscape quality in degraded and everyday landscapes, without outstanding aesthetic values but important in quality of life because being placed in suburban areas. To this end visual landscape approach is yielded, using gis techniques and validating results in Muntanyes d'Ordal, in Barcelona's metropolitan region (Spain).

An indirect landscape assessment procedure is developed, considering landscape from a quality and fragility point of view. Landscape quality refers to intrinsic values; landscape fragility refers to responses to changes. Both, quality and fragility are of interest in urban planning: the former gives information about most interesting areas from a landscape's values point of view and the later from urban planning perspective. Besides that, also physiographic and ecologic landscape values have been also considered. Ground work has provided the most of the information, collecting data at 1:5,000 accuracy. Vector and raster data models have been used, creating final maps of 10m pixels and 1:10,000 accuracy. Microstation v8 (c) Bentley and ArcGis 10 (c) ESRI software has been used.

Landscape quality has been assessed giving positives values to land cover, vegetation, relief and terrain structure. Also punctual elements have been considered, according to local inhabitant's perception. In general terms, forested areas, contrasted relief, cliffs and eye-catching colours in rocks have been positively valuated in a 1 to 5 scale range. Viewsheds from positive and negative considered elements have been calculated, giving a +2 punctuation to the positive ones and -1 to the negative ones.

Landscape fragility has been assessed considering those variables which increase or decrease visual absorption, such as height vegetation, slope or aspect, in a 1 to 5 scale range. Viewsheds have been calculated from peaks, gazers, urban areas, and roads. Eventually both layers have been combined and new values reclassified.

Finally quality and fragility landscape's maps have been synthesised, in order to make results easy to understand and use in urban planning. Values harmonisation has been done considering that low quality values and low fragility values mean high aptitude to receive new urban planning and, inversely, high quality values and high fragility values mean low aptitude to receive new planning. Final results have been classified in five categories legend, from very low to very height.

A 5.97% of the studied area has a very high aptitude to receive new urban developments, whereas the most of the studied area (44.71% and 25.08%) have high and medium values. The studied area contains some protected areas, which mean 65.29% of very high or high values to receive new planning. Those areas, because being protected, should be discarded in new planning. On the contrary, outside protected areas, more than 50% of the studied area has high values to receive new planning. That means beside landscape values, those areas are adjacent to already built up areas or in a distance lower to 50m, so new planning is desirable to take place within.

Exercises like this one have an important applied value and are a good tool in urban planning, especially in degraded, suburban and everyday landscapes, because prevent from a landscape improvement and helps to a well-being and quality landscapes.

Palabras llave : Landscape; landscape quality; landscape fragility; urban planning; Barcelona Metropolitan Region.

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