Multivariate Applications in the Evaluation of the Discipline of Agriculture: Extra-Urban Spaces and the Resistivity Index

Agronomic studies represent a supplemental but inevitable element of the municipal urban plan, which must guarantee agricultural lands their ranking as a non-negotiable resource, thereby protecting its own maintenance for the irreversibility of its eventual transformation. Furthermore, in recent years in Italy, the exasperated conflict regarding extra-urban space, between building expansion and the practice of agriculture, combined with a growing environmental sensitivity, has shifted the epicenter of political and scientific attention to the unacceptable waste of soil that has occurred in recent decades. As a result, awareness has increased with regard to the finiteness of such a non-renewable resource and the implications of its safeguarding: that it results in the protection of important historical roots, the strong character of the landscape, and the tremendous quality of agricultural production in Italy. However, the attempt to protect agricultural grounds, within the municipal urban plan, is perhaps in vain, illusory, and unrealistic without the knowledge of the multiple variables that oversee the extra-urban structure. The extra-urban structure is viewed from the perspective of a protection that must rest – beyond the exonerative popular environmental ideologies – on the estimate of the agro-productive field and on the individual business capacity to resist the urbanization solicitations generating profit, investments, environmental production and qualified produce, multifunctionality, as new European agrarian politics intend. To these results we can attribute the careful use of Geographic Information Systems, allowing for the identification of the agricultural sector in extra-urban spaces and, at the same time, highlighting the areas that can resist pressure regarding land output better than others. The versatility of GIS tools allows for not only the (almost too banal) utilization of topologic overlay techniques but also – and most importantly – the evaluation of a synthetic indicator of resistivity of the agricultural enterprise, by means of geostatistical applications of multivariate analysis. In this way, it is possible to guarantee that urban decisions are sufficient in the conservation of the evermore scarce soil resource, while simultaneously safeguarding the country of Italy, its extremely evolved agricultural enterprise system, its unique landscape, and the services that it can offer in great variety, quantity, and quality.