Urban regeneration and urban-industrial Nature design

The issues related to the ecological and digital transition are closely intertwined with those of the project of regeneration of the built environment. If, on the one hand, mitigation strategies outline long-term scenarios, on the other, the effects of changed environmental conditions and its crises pose compelling challenges for cities to redesign and recompose existing ones into quality adaptive spaces. The introduction of green-blue infrastructures can represent an opportunity for urban design culture. It is about deepening the idea of nature in the city, the sense of open spaces and the role they can play in the composition and re-composition of the city. These themes are now intertwined with those of wilderness and the urban-industrial Nature of spaces waiting, built and in use, abandoned or in disuse. Its relevance derives from being a refuge for biodiversity and, at the same time, regenerative material through urban design that creatively interprets its figures. The figure of the forest (sĭlva) refers to voids, edges, thresholds, transitions, fringes that undermine the clear definitions between inside-outside, open-closed, permeable-impermeable. The design operations are those of preserving the void and stratifying the margins. The intrusive character of wildness 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 imagery is tested in the project of regeneration and enhancement of a recent urban landscape, an ordinary suburb built by commercial and productive warehouses. The result is a multi-dimensional architecture that finds the themes, figures and operations in the processes of urban regeneration through the composition of urban-industrial Nature and its wilderness oriented to the qualitative transition, which is considered to be necessarily simultaneous, of the performance and, at the same time, of the form of the built environment.