GREEN INTERVENTIONS FOR RECONNECTING URBAN LIMINAL SPACES. TWO EXPERIENCES IN RESEARCH AND TEACHING

Pre-modernist times considered green areas as something rural and wild or for exclusively private use. As modern cities redefined the interaction between nature and artifice, green areas were subjected to public infrastructures to compensate for the effects of intensive urbanization. The technicist use of green resources restricted it to a reductive vision of urban planning standards, fenced-off playing fields, isolated trees and residual gardens. The abandonment of historic centres, the disaggregation of the industrial city and the numerous crises faced by the city are leaving behind a heterogeneous legacy of leftover, fragmented, incomplete, built or empty spaces that call for a reinvention of how vegetation is used. This raises new challenges for environmental, urban and technological design. The time has come to reconsider green resources as a living and evolving material for repairing, restoring and re-integrating liminal and transitional spaces within the shifting dynamics of the city.
This article summarizes the methodological steps and horizons of innovation emerging from two research experiences on liminal spaces of two settlements in Central-Southern Italy.
A cross-disciplinary and interscalar approach was used to explore scenarios for integrating greening in infrastructural micro-interventions designed to improve the city’s capacities for resilience, inclusion and vitality and the conditions of well-being and health offered to users.