Urban sprawl and the ‘olive’ landscape: sustainable land management for ‘crisis’ cities Massimo Cecchini . Ilaria Zambon . Antonella Pontrandolfi . Rosario Turco . Andrea Colantoni . Anastasios Mavrakis . Luca Salvati Ó Springer Science+Business Media B.V., part of Springer Nature 2018 Abstract Dispersed urbanization has expanded into rural land worldwide. The present work focused on the Athens’ metropolitan area, the capital of Greece, discussing the potential role of a typical rural Mediterranean landscape dominated by olive groves, in urban containment and peri-urban conservation of biodiversity and local traditions. Having a great cultural, culinary and aesthetic importance, olive groves characterize Mediterranean peri-urban land- scapes in a distinctive way. This study identifies processes of urban dispersion and changes in the ‘olive landscape’ in the study area, proposing new ideas for a sustainable land management in metropolitan contexts that have recently undergone processes of territorial transformation toward urban sprawl, under the effect of socioeconomic disturbances, including economic crisis. Keywords Landscape Á Olive Á Athens Á Metropolitan area Á Sustainable land management Á Recession M. Cecchini Á I. Zambon (&) Á A. Colantoni Department of Agricultural and Forestry Sciences (DAFNE), Tuscia University, Via S. Camillo De Lellis snc, 01100 Viterbo, Italy e-mail: ilaria.zambon@unitus.it M. Cecchini e-mail: cecchini@unitus.it A. Colantoni e-mail: colantoni@unitus.it A. Pontrandolfi Council for Agricultural Research and Economics (CREA-AA), Via della Navicella 2-4, 00184 Rome, Italy e-mail: antonella.pontrandolfi@crea.gov.it R. Turco Á L. Salvati Council for Agricultural Research and Economics (CREA-FL), Viale Santa Margherita 80, 52100 Arezzo, Italy e-mail: rosario.turco@crea.gov.it L. Salvati e-mail: luca.salvati@crea.gov.it A. Mavrakis Department of Economic and Regional Development, Institute of Urban Environment and Human Resources, Panteion University, 136 Syngrou Avenue, 17671 Athens, Greece e-mail: mavrakisan@yahoo.gr 123 GeoJournal https://doi.org/10.1007/s10708-018-9848-5