Guidelines for the reuse, recovery and sustainable transformation of farm and urban agriculture. Strategy development for Pavia.

The cultivation of plants and the breeding of animals enabled a rapid increase in the global population, which currently reaches eight billion. Today, large metropolises stand, consuming 75% of the Earth's resources. While, on the one hand, the population density of cities is growing faster than their physical area, which helps prevent soil consumption, on the other hand, the high demand for food threatens its availability in the coming years and the fertility of the soil (World Cities Report, 2022). Urban farming provides an appropriate response to the constantly expanding urban areas, as agriculture today must find new strategies to meet the demands of the present. In this context, the idea of producing food in cities, which currently is a home to more than half of the world's population, could be an interesting area of research and studies aimed at optimizing production and solving the problem of land consumption. Since the last century, various visions of self-sufficient cities have been promoted. The most well-known idea is Ebenezer Howard's Garden City, which advocated for the creation of self-sufficient settlements that would combine the advantages of urban and rural life while minimizing problems caused by excessive urbanization. Garden cities were to be planned in such a way that each community would have access to local food production, green spaces, and recreational areas. Assuming that the number of communities in cities is steadily increasing, visionary ideas from the 19th century are becoming an increasingly realistic solution to social needs. This dissertation analyzes strategies for integrating food production into the urban structure. It establishes a typology of urban farming and employs it as an analytical framework for designing effective strategic development plans aimed at enhancing urban resilience. Through the analysis of case studies and the contextual dynamics of urban farming, the city of Pavia has been identified as a testbed for the implementation of pilot projects, conceived as potential pathways for the sustainable development of small-scale cities within the Po Valley.