Arcipelaghi produttivi per una urbanità alpina [Productive Archipelagos for an Alpine Urbanity]

How is the mountain landscape transformed by the dispersed development of industrial production? How can productive areas be rethought within complex orographic contexts? This article addresses the project-related challenges posed by scattered industrial areas in alpine urbanities through a case study in Trentino. The diffusion of productive settlements in the Alps is interpreted as part of a broader condition that also characterizes dispersed urban forms in lowland areas, where the proliferation of productive fragments – underutilized spaces, abandoned buildings, unsold industrial sheds, vacant plots – contributes to the construction of an “urban countryside” shaped by processes of peripheral urbanization and incremental land consumption. The project challenge concerns the need to rationalize settlements and to repair the landscape by initiating processes of environmental and functional regeneration. The specific characteristics of the orographic context, its “territorial anisotropy” and the richness of its diversities, make it possible to recognize heterogeneity and discontinuity as values: resources for a project of coexistence among dissimilar elements configured as productive “archipelagos”. Low- and mid-altitude mountain areas thus represent a sensitive testing ground for rearticulating industrial zones as components of a territorial architecture in transition. This approach entails intervening in neglected, marginal, or discarded areas that escape common perception and are often considered insignificant. Understanding these spaces and reinterpreting their relationships with broader contexts anticipates project elements and logics that enable productive settlements to be reconsidered as constructions capable of generating ecologies and landscapes, thereby contributing to a reflection on emerging urbanities and the future configurations of the “landscape-city”.