## 7 Conclusions  
Until today the environmental management of the city of Shkoder has not properly taken into account the water areas and their spatial variations across time although they have long been praised as a valuable area of development, as well as a natural wealth of high global significance for the existing ecological dynamics. With this awareness, Shkoder city is now at the beginning of a third phase of urbanization during which laws and regulations must be developed and enforced so that all real estate (existing or of new construction) will eventually become entirely formal in compliance with the undeniable environmental issues. Beyond upgrading, the informal settlements need to be spatially, functionally and socially integrated into the urban system. The assimilation of citizens of these areas into the city requires not only the improvement of services but also the spatial integration of the informal settlements through public transport access and the extension of road and pedestrian networks. Such measures can facilitate links of proximity and exchange between new districts and the established neighbourhoods of the core city. However, in approaching such development activities, we have to consider that the city of Shkoder is not still equipped with extensive, systematic, and quantitatively adequate hydraulic defence works able to control and regulate all the floods coming from the lake (its main hydraulic threat). Insufficiently designed and questionable existing interventions do not make the entire area enough safe. The use of European Space Agency satellites Sentinel-1 radar data and Sentinel-2 optical data was successfully tested to evaluate the extension of the 2018 Drin and Buna Rivers overflow and of the Shkoder lake plain flooding. By means of Sentinel-2 data, two RGB colour composites maps and the NDWI map were produced, while using Sentinel-1 data a rapid flood mapping was generated. The proposed approach outputs were validated comparing them with official Copernicus EMS map available for one of the chosen events. This comparison shows good accordance results even if some refinement like post-processing edit can be applied (a) to filter out isolated flood elements, (b) to remove possible water-lookalikes, (c) to weed out false positives, and (d) to distinguish inundated areas from permanent water bodies related to the usual water level of the lake and river. Results show that natural vegetated area and agricultural ones located beside the lake are mainly affected by the water fluctuations. Summarizing: (a) The 1 December 2017 event has the minimum extension, and none of the informal areas seems to be directly touched by the event; (b) the 5 March 2018 and 11 March 2018 events, combined with the lake level rapid rise, the insufficient drainage capacity of the Buna river and of the downstream hydrographic node, affected many natural vegetated areas, the informal area n\({}^{\circ}\) 6, and reached the south-west border of the informal area n\({}^{\circ}\) 2; (c) the improved management of the upstream dams produced positive effects on the informal area n\({}^{\circ}\) 5, normally at high risk for its geographical position, as it did not suffer harmful inundations as in the recent past events; (d) no one of the other informal areas were significantly affected by these events.