Don’t Split Them Up! Landscape Design of Multifunctional Open Spaces Suitable for Coping with Flash Floods and River Floods

Pressures arising from agriculture, infrastructures and settlements have gradually reduced natural spaces of European watercourses limiting their self-regulation capacities, environmental and social potentials, resulting in widespread critical anthropic features. Dealing with flood phenomena adds artificiality, as several works for hydraulic protection are necessary. This was the case of Pistoia, a small city in the north of Tuscany, where the Ombrone stream, held in a straight-channeled course since the 18th century, sometimes breaks its embankments and floods the low plain from the southeast of Pistoia to downstream. Complying with the EU Floods Directive (2007/60/EC), the regional authority for flood risks planned some basins in the high plain upstream of Pistoia. A study we developed before this research assumed to shift the design approach from functional separation to full integration of hydraulic works in an area planned as an urban park for several years, but still in waiting. We now carried out a second study that adopts the concept of deep structure as the main design reference to “see” the park in the landscape features. This article concerns the research by the design process just developed to investigate a sustainable layout of the place new hydraulic asset as a basic landscape identity of the future park. Not to split spaces up with regard to their main functions was the general aim the process was focused on to combine an effective hydraulic protection with a full environmental and social enhancement of the urban park.