Telerilevamento mediante l’ausilio di Google Earth Engine per il monitoraggio del consumo del suolo e della riduzione del verde urbano: un caso studio nella piana casertana

In the last few decades, the remarkable increase in the number of people living in urban areas around the world has posed new challenges for urban planning. The envi-ronmental, economic, and social issues of urban sprawl are well-known also in several metropolitan areas of Italy. In this paper, we consider a southern city of Italy (Campania Region), Caserta and its surroundings. We use several satellite images with different spa-tial and spectral resolutions (Landsat, Sentinel, and KH-9 Hexagon) within the Google Earth Engine platform, to map the main land use changes of Caserta conurbation from the 1980s till 2021. The results highlight the great land consumption and, at the same time, the relevant urban infill that occurred in this area in this short period, both on top-ographic and local scale (referring, in this last case, only to the town of Caserta). While at an early stage, the increase in artificial areas responds to a specific demand related to the increase in the resident population, the urban growth of the last two decades has more complex answers. Systematic delays in land use planning and a biased perspective (usually focusing only on the municipal scale) to solve the problems of a significantly larger area means insufficient services to the citizens in their daily lives (mainly in rela-tion to local public transport and the actual availability of urban green areas)