Martedi 9 luglio 2024 alle ore 16.30 in modalità telematica Gaia Nerea Terlicher presenterà una prima parte del progetto WaterMiTCities al convegno internazionale Terraenvision (https://terraenvision.eu/). Durante la presentazione verranno illustrata l’evoluzione del concetto di spazio pubblico dal ‘900 ad oggi evidenziando come nella contemporaneità il tema dello spazio pubblico sia una questione di suolo.

Abstract

Camillo Sitte, in his book “The Art of Building Cities,” nostalgically recalled the value that public spaces held in antiquity: “Back then, the main squares of cities were a vital necessity of the first order,” he wrote, whereas “today, squares, rarely used for grand collective festivities and increasingly less for daily life, primarily serve to provide more light and air.” What happened throughout the 20th century was the triumph of technique over art, buildings over city space, function over happiness. In 1961, Jane Jacobs wrote “The Death and Life of Great American Cities,” a critique of the architects and urban planners of the time, urging a return to the City, which consists of spatial and social dimensions, social and material life, and reciprocal interactions (Perrone, 2017). Modern tradition, envisioning the city as a series of autonomous, non-communicating sectors, pursued the idea of a functional city where the private sphere prevails over the public, assuming that the various activities of the city could be compartmentalized in urban planning. Marco Romano called this an “absurdity,” stating that the activities of the city are ephemeral and fragile and do not constitute the city’s framework, as they do not admit change. As he wrote in “Building Cities,” “the art of the city consists in managing differences, not imagining that these differences do not exist,” according to which it is the symbolic city that binds, that holds together the differences and that constitutes the stable structure of the city and from which the reflection on the future of the same must start.
From the failure of the modern programmatic thinking, today we witness a reclaiming of public space and with it all the values that characterize it. Since the 1980s, with the first processes of regenerating the suburbs, the recovery of buildings, and the theme of the urban landscape, the reflection on the city has expanded. The idea that the city’s design should be subordinated to traffic management is abandoned in favor of citizens reclaiming public space. Alongside social issues, environmental themes arise, with urban spaces being considered responsible for psycho-physical well-being. The objective of public space is to develop a sustainable city model capable of adapting to and mitigating the effects of climate change by reintroducing the relationship between nature and artifice that was lost during the last century. In public space design, the soil with its substrates assumes a fundamental role for the well-being of ecological cycles. The soil, as agronomist William Bryant Logan says, is a “skin” that, like a living organism, breathes, absorbs, and repels. The indispensable role of soil in the ecological system necessitates its recognition as the most important aspect for the city’s survival, urging the realization that future planning will be guided by climate change (van der Berg and van der Made, 2021). Healthy soil is the prerequisite for biodiversity and the right living conditions for people. Through soil design, public space promotes healthy living conditions for its inhabitants, favoring processes of urban renaturalization.