The Urban Forest in the Age of Urbanization seeks to reflect on the connotation of urban forestry in line with related emergent holistic theories. Today, much of the planet is urbanised and planners debate "Planetary Urbanization", economists discuss "The Global City", ecologists describe the planet's biodiversity hotspots, and climate scientists warn of a "global" crisis. We might think therefore that focusing on forestation approaches at the Urban and peri-urban "edge", might be reductionist. However, if the city is everywhere, and everything is a city, if the urbanised world now is a chain of metropolitan areas connected by places and corridors of communication, then what is not urban? And above all, which forests are not urban forests? Starting from the dualism between city and forest and its evolution towards holism, the book seeks to create a framework of dialectical approaches. The case studies included analyse a wide range of urbanisation "processes" to review the practical approaches of urban forestry, in line with the global crisis of the era of globalisation, when climate change, population growth, implosions and explosions of urbanisation, lack of arable land and food are unavoidable.

Processes driving urban growth are inherently related to multiple socio-economic factors, making the analysis of urban form and functions a challenging and complicated endeavour. Several fundamental factors and contextual indicators contribute to identify the main determinants of urban growth, that include economic and demographic variables, the socio-spatial structure, territorial patterns, institutional, religious and cultural attributes. Understanding spatio-temporal patterns of economic resilience can support the adoption of explicit developmental policies addressing specificities and local weaknesses of regional contexts. Thirty years after the seminal work entitled 'The Mediterranean City in Transition' by Lila Leontidou, the present contribution re-formulates a narrative framework interpreting the medium-term evolution of Southern European cities and generalises this frame to the analysis of other metropolitan areas with similar morphological and functional characteristics worldwide. Going beyond traditional Mediterranean discourses grounded on economic backwardness, social secularism, and demographic mix, an original interpretation of Mediterranean urbanities is proposed related to the local governance, real estate bubbles, land-use mix, and deregulation in urban expansion. Focusing on socioeconomic development processes in the Northern Mediterranean, the lost opportunity to reduce regional disparities and to give value to scenic and cultural values of the cities and the surrounding countryside are additional issues considered in this vision. Basing on a narrative analysis of ecologically fragile and socially fragmented Mediterranean contexts, the pervasiveness of a structural crisis - affecting regional and country economic systems, while infiltrating in the institutions, local governance systems, and the society, is finally debated as a contribution to a better understanding of complex urbanities worldwide.