Oltre il giardino. Verso la città paesaggio

In Marghera, a town planned according to the models of the garden city in the frame of the twentieth-century productive settlement, the development of a design vision for the City-care acquires an exemplary and paradigmatic value, more than anywhere else. According with this vision, the new challenges for Marghera concern the planning of a progressive and irreversible transition from the specialized city of the twentieth century separating residential gardens from the productive enclosures, to the multifunctional mixitè of the contemporary urban system. This crucial passage can be triggered, taking into account the unavoidable complexity of the XXI century city and interpreting each part of the territory as landscape, also considering the revolutionary definition proposed by the European Landscape Convention (Florence, 2000). Therefore, talking about landscape city in Marghera invites us to overturn acquired and consolidated certainties to rediscover and track down a renewed solidarity and virtuous and healthy interaction between anthropic / cultural and natural components. Particularly, a crucial matter concern exploring, interpreting and understanding alternative forms of urban wilderness in order to manage and interact with them. In this sense, planning and design issues concern mostly strategies, scales of intervention and practices to read, reinterpret and cultivate greenery, according with the different natures of the new “industrial gardens” in Marghera. Other crucial challenges in terms of city care are the increase of biological diversity for animal and plant populations, with particular reference to the renewed ecological potential of the Fourth Nature evolving on post-industrial soils, and the development of a specific resilience to climate change and extreme events, by the use of greenery and permeable and compatible surfaces. The landscape project is, by its nature, particularly featured by the elements of the softscape, the living and changing materials inhabiting the tree, shrub and herbaceous levels, to which we can add, in the case of Venice and Marghera, the lagoon multiform waterscape which continuously reshapes the territory. The different categories of water bodies (naturally present and / or artificially organized) acquire a recognized and characterizing landscape specificity in the Venetian context, but also the greenery can be read as one of the key systems composing and designing both the cities, Venice and Marghera, according to different patterns and fabric, through the widespread network of open spaces of different scales and types.