Urban regions require planning tools in order to manage agricultural areas under urban pressure. The aim of our paper is to test an analytical framework that combines both the composition in urban and agricultural land covers and their spatial confguration into four general agri-urban patterns: isolated felds, urban belt felds, periurban agricultural areas and
rural areas. We evaluated the spatial distribution and the changes of such patterns in the short-term (2003–2011) starting from Spot images for the case study of Pisa, Italy. The results indicate an increase of the most urban
patterns despite continuing to have cash crops, a stability of periurban agricultural land patterns although highly fragmented, and a decrease of
the rural agricultural land patterns. The applied methodology can help to
identify new measures and actions suitable in order to strengthen the relationships between city and agriculture existing in urban regions.
