New wilderness. The regenerative architecture of urban-industrial Nature

The territorial dimension of the settlements and the new urbanities that incorporate and are incorporated by Nature, require the transformation of the point of view, establishing regenerative “minglings” between apparently irreconcilable elements. The Nature for city is at the top of the list of materials on which to base the composition of the contemporary “landscape-city” and the re-generation of parts-places of it. An issue that now is intertwined with those of wildness. In our cities, Nature takes back its spaces, the selva re-emerges as a primary figure and imposes a project, especially in the “urban-industrial Nature” where natural processes often create completely new habitats based on existing resources. Its relevance derives from being a refuge for biodiversity and, at the same time, a useful design material. Observed by the disciplines of architectural and urban design for the spatial composition and regeneration, in the “new wilderness” the figure of the selva refers to the significant voids and to edges, thresholds, transitions, fringes that undermine the clear definitions between inside-out, open-closed, permeable-impermeable. The design operations are those of preserving the boundary void and the stratification of margins. The intrusive character of “new wilderness” refers to the processes of colonization of space with figures that undermine physical and perceptual boundaries. The design operations are those of confusing and re-connoting them. This thematic and figurative imagery is applied to the project of regeneration and enhancement of a significant fragment of a recent urban landscape in northern Italy, an ordinary suburb built by commercial and productive sheds along a busy road, large asphalt forecourts, abandoned or underused intercluded spaces, surviving tracks of amena Nature, weak and fragmented relationships. Within this framework, the process of wilderness regeneration is understood first as a methodological approach, which is a question of verifying the potential that emerging themes for the contemporary project must creatively tamper with the urban architectural form.