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The demographic aging and the evolution of lifestyles require new strategies to promote the well-being and active aging of elderly. Active aging depends on many factors: some of these are related to objective data such as physical environment, others are personal elements; it is important to improve environmental physical factors to encourage personal attitudes to the green spaces in use. To design a small sustainable restorative green space in Milan, Italy, restorative garden design criteria are summarized in the first section of the paper and both social and environmental sustainability are considered. The methodology section describes the co-design process and how it was applied to include different older user groups in the design of the area. In the results section authors apply a taxonomy based on the four properties of restorative settings according to the Attention Restoration Theory by Kaplan (compatibility, being away, extent, fascination): this provides a unified system to classify users’ expectations and to describe the final project. The proposed co-design process combines social and environmental sustainability, as it provides designers an insight about the user’s experience in nature. Such information can be fruitfully integrated with professional competences about comfort aspects and environmental protection in order to improve the whole design project.

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“Land take” is a process of land-use change in which the agricultural and natural land is taken by residential, industrial, infrastructure and other developments. This change causes the loss of a non-renewable resource, such as the agricultural/natural soil, and the relative natural, cultural and landscape resources. The growing awareness about the loss of ecosystem services related to land take led developed countries to try to reduce the quantity of land taken with new laws and regulations. The European Union has set the goal of zero land take by 2050. It is not only a problem of limiting and slowing down the phenomenon, but it is always clearer that the quality of the land taken has to be assessed and adequately considered during the land-use planning process. In fact, in some cases like in the Lombardy Region, the law focuses not only on reducing the amount of land take, but also on limiting the loss of land with “high qualities”, requiring municipalities to assess the productive, naturalistic and landscape qualities of the territory. In this paper, the authors develop, using the GIS technology, a methodology to define and calculate a composite “Land Quality Index” (LQI). The methodology has been applied to a case study in the Lombardy region and has allowed to assess the quality of the territory in a rigorous and transparent way using available official data. In order to take into account the relative importance that stakeholders and land-use planners can give to the different components of LQI, AHP (Analytic Hierarchy Process) has been performed ad 4 different scenarios have been developed. LQI can support the land-use planning process in an ex-ante evaluation of different transformations hypotheses and in the definition of “quality-based” quantitative thresholds and monitoring of their trend over the time.