Critical landscapes: an opportunity for a new public space's design approach

The processes of transformation that occurred in the Italian metropolitan areas over the last decade have strongly expanded the fragmented landscape, especially in the fringe areas of urban systems. In these metastable spaces affected by a loss of species abundance, the urban landscape alternates itself to rural and natural landscape in a random and unplanned way so that the communities, who live in this hybrid landscape, have an ambiguous perception of the identity of these places. The open spaces, waiting for a future destination that is slow to take shape, are quickly defined as "waste spaces" that generate ecological degradation and social insecurity. The landscape project in order to regenerate these public and private open spaces has to become a "system" and to trig a process for a new type of "public space", based on the flexibility of the functions and on the temporariness and reversibility of installations. This new approach to the transformation of hybrid landscapes and undefined open spaces has been experimented and carried out into the frame of a Lab of Landscape Design of the University of Florence, aimed to restore and trig new significant relationships between the periurban system of the city of Florence and its river. The case study shown is located in a critical territory named Argingrosso, along the Arno river, left side, that is playing the role of an expansion basin planned by the regional River Basin Authority. Nowadays Argingrosso hosts a mixture of public and private functions in a conflictual combination of critical activities, improper land uses and high risk levels for natural ecosystems. The project answers to the urgent need to redefine the categories of “urban beauty”, involving in this collective opera, the dimension of the productive work, the care of landscape management and the use of agriculture as a tool to add urban natures, stimulate biodiversity and increase the landscape lasting resilience both in ecological and social terms.