Article

Where are we?

We are living in the ecological transition which aims to reach ambitious sustainable development goals in the next decades. The design of open spaces in this transition requires ethic, aesthetic, and collective intelligence because nature is in continuous evolution. We need to apply such processual and regenerative strategies to our projects and their environment to adapt both urban structure and social behaviours for the future. Contemporary challenges of society and economy as well as the climate emergency are consequences of our past treatment of nature. The urgent need for change has never been as obvious as it became over the past years – the systems to maintain our daily - globalized, and quickly changing - life were weak and hardly withstand the current crisis and its upcoming consequences. We are today in a particularly valuable moment of reset in which unbelievable changes of our systems seem possible.

The transition of our values and methods was not as quick as the transition of our productivity and the changes of the planet we inhabit. We collectively reached a moment to take a deep breath and reflect upon our interaction with nature since the end of the industrial revolution. And it is important to accept that the landscape consist of our culture towards nature, it reflects our footprint, our values and knowledge of that time. We see spoiled land all around: enormous empty quarries, wide parking or transport areas of sealed ground and boundless vastness of monoculture. It took some time to understand that while exploiting the natural resources to such extent, we caused harm to what is essentially our basic source of life. A new societal awareness for nature and a certain protective instinct is growing slowly but steady and generates finally a political and economic shift with high potential to become mainstream.

Since more than 30 years our work aims to improve the wellbeing of people, fight climate change and increase biodiversity, conscious of the human role in relation with nature and among themselves. Our acronym LAND manifests itself in all our works: Landscape (at every scale), Architecture (spaces for people), Nature (cultivating resilience) and Development (for a more sustainable future). We understand that it is within our competences to take this new role to connect people with nature again and give it back its forgotten value for the functioning of our globalized world. We can’t intervene in any context if we don’t know what we are working with, the knowledge about local climate, species, interregional water- and biodiversity corridors are crucial to understand what we are working with and what we have to change. With growing knowledge about our working space, we create awareness, we learn which species are already working in this area, which natural boundaries and connections we must respect and protect, and to which extend should we intervene with the fragility of existing social structures. “Landscape architecture teaches architects that living structures cannot be paralyzed in static schemes”, Bruno Zevi reminds us and indeed, the awareness does not stop within the work of the landscape architect but must be transferred to our sister-professions and even to the users of the spaces as well. Which brings us to the third aspect, the continuity. Landscape architects plan development processes, we start interventions to heal damaged ecosystems and reconnect people with nature; we deal with governance of our urban and rural areas. Perception is an essential component to start long lasting changes: in the 1980’s Willy Brandt imagined that the skies of his Ruhr turned blue again. After more than 30 years of cultivation we relish the completed regeneration of the Emscher river and its cities, made the Ruhr European Capital of Culture and in 2017 Essen was named European Green Capital : these events shifted irreversibly the mind set of people and paved the way for a new societal and political course. And all those accomplishments need to be followed up by the cultivation. Cultivating productive landscapes which recover soil, water and biodiversity in a multidimensional way empower ecosystem services 1 key elements to improve human wellbeing and provide a forward-looking sustainable future. But even like this it’s too late to be moderate! We need to act now to ensure a liveable environment for future generations. We can turn the big challenges of our time into opportunities: nature-based solutions are an effective tool to address environmental, social and economic issues, digitalization and technological research can give a boost to shift to a climate neutral society. Our ambition is great: we deserve a better life quality, and we aspire to a fairer economy. We need to implement growth of the natural capital within our economic systems. Green infrastructure is the answer: it is a social matter because it concerns everybody, so we need to communicate this message clearly through co-creation processes and territorial cooperation. Landscape architects are mediators in this momentum of global transition, and we must show the local and regional governments that our work on implementation of green strategies is not an option but the best possible solution.

The profession of sensitive transition

Making landscape architecture, especially in Italy and in a European city like Milan, means training to listen, enhancing observation tools towards a continuous dialogue between the built environment and open space, conservation and development. Indeed, this also means to take part of the debate on contemporary urban planning. An open approach of continuous learning and re-evaluation makes the design tailored and adaptive.

A landscape architect tries to discover problems linked to the territory and listens to the needs of the local people, empowering them to use their public space. Establishing this dialogue between the public and the private, architecture and nature, consolidation and transformation gives a soul, a story, and a reason to a space. These premises make it clear that landscape design is an atypical discipline, in which the pace of realization is drawn out in comparison with the ever faster one of construction. Today landscape architects try to make their work the basis for processes of transformation and management of the territory, to discover wider ideas of regeneration. In the complex planning processes, the landscape architect is well suited to the role of the moderator, thanks to a multidisciplinary approach capable of coordinating and acting “glocally” - both within his or her own team and towards the outside world; and raising its voice for the needs of nature.

The cultural transition and its projection in landscape

Landscape is not an unchanging commodity, but rather a lively complex system, shaped and moulded by people and ever changing. In this sense, landscape is a mirror of society, a representation of past and present that is open to future changes. This reflects on heavy human intervention in landscape such as infrastructure and extraction of recourses.

Extensive Infrastructure: In Airolo (Canton Ticino), on the upper end of the Valle Leventina below the Gotthard Massif, it became important to reconcile the importance of transportation with the foundations of nature, so that the town could systematically plan its proper the future (“back to nature”) and strengthen its identity through tourism. This truly revolutionary development began with a civic initiative promoted by former long-time mayor Franco Pedrini that has now become part of the largest landscape project in Switzerland. This project shows the advantages of an approach that puts nature first in the process to develop territories.

Airolo found itself trapped in a cage of infrastructure that cut off natural and social connections between the two sides of the valley. The channelling of the Ticino river and construction of the valley basin are even more build borders for nature. Now, the construction of the second bore of the highway tunnel has freed material that can be used to cover about one kilometre of highway and the old railway line at the end of the south portal and create a green passageway. The material will be used to reunite what had once been brutally separated - construction does not get more sustainable than that. Portions of the valley floor will be remediated and access will be created to the revitalized river banks.

Extraction of resources: The ecological problems of opencast mining, the questionability of its energy and economic benefits, and unacceptable social consequences (relocation of entire towns) demand swift decisions. Landscape planning cannot wait – it must begin sooner. Especially when it involves an enormous area, basically a 48 km2 “hole in the landscape” like the brown coal fields in the Garzweiler II opencast mining area in the northern Rhineland, Germany.

The Green Band, which according to LAND’s masterplan will be developed along the edge of the post-mining landscape, will bring together people and nature, agricultural production and culture. It will create a space for wildlife conservation, biodiversity, traditional and new forms of agriculture and mobility as well as recreation. So that the past is not forgotten, the history of opencast mining will be made visible. The Garzweiler opencast mine and its surroundings will become a sort of laboratory for new technologies and visions for the future and a model project of international stature.

Foresight and evolution through landscape strategies

Enforcing natural processes by planting, riverbed-renaturation, soil unsealing and intelligent positioning of infrastructures allows the creation of a systemic green infrastructure providing several benefits for the local environment and community.
The study of the Masterplan of the Domitian-Flegrean coastline is based on the initiative of the Regional Council to develop an application tool for the integrated enhancement and redevelopment of coastal landscapes in application of the forthcoming Regional Landscape Plan. The master plan was developed through a participatory approach (expressions of interest, planning workshops) involving 14 municipalities, the regional administration and various stakeholders in the area. This process produced a territorial framework to systematise and identify public works, private projects and environmental, landscape and cultural assets, identified as drivers for the relaunch of an area which is today characterised by numerous uncertainties. The founding objectives of the master plan are on one hand the requalification and optimisation of the ecological and landscape-environmental system through the green-blue infrastructure and on the other hand the support of the historical-cultural system and the sustainable mobility to strengthen tourism and local identity and recognition.

“Arriving at each new city, the traveller finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: a foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places.”
– Italo Calvino. Invisible Cities.

The tangible nature

Urban heating, flooding, air pollution and obsolete business segments are being confronted by a policy of local recreation, new distribution of public space and Nature Based Solutions.2 Their implementation reveals that nature can help us to solve our self-made problems.
The mental shift from ruling nature to working closely together with it is necessary to reposition the relation of culture and nature and to develop a balanced and long-lasting coexistence. Nature based solutions are the tool to deploy this strategy throughout Europe and create an excellence platform on sustainable development available to all European citizens. Nature based solutions are nature-inspired interventions aiming to re-establish natural functioning within our cities. They have tremendous potential to be energy and resource-efficient and resilient to change, but to be successful they must be adapted to local conditions. European community has been given effective programs, such as the European Green Capital Award, to spread and replicate research and proactive results, thus create productive collaborations and fostering new local opportunities with international recall.3
The European Commission has been moving in this direction for over a decade to provide common guidelines and address the debate on sustainable urban planning of the future. Particularly the 2014-2020 work program introduced in 2011 a strong focus on the conversation and spread of biodiversity as a priority to severe environmental issues, enhance urban quality and promote a sustainable equal economic benefit throughout the restoration of ecosystem services. Today, we even have a European Biodiversity Strategy for 2030, a comprehensive, ambitious and long-term plan to protect nature and reserve the degradation of ecosystems.4 Green infrastructures assume a leading role in urban regeneration as they address the main urban challenges through a multidisciplinary inclusive approach aiming to bring back nature into cities and thus generate social, economic, and environmental benefits thanks to performing ecosystems. The task is re-establishing our lost connection with nature, not with the mostly superficial green architecture, but re-shaping the relation between nature and human intervention.5

The intervention alongside the Lura river in the northwest of Milan involved a mono-functional agricultural area and wooded strips with low ecological value, located between the municipalities of Lomazzo, Cadorago and Bregnano and led to the construction, using natural engineering techniques, of new banks and flood lamination basins along the course of the river Lura. The project is part of a supra-regional strategy of hydro-geological risk reduction. A permanent wetland with hygrophilous vegetation has been created thanks to two basins designed to collect water from the stream in the event of flooding and to the adjacent pond fed with groundwater. This created a habitat for the settlement of various animal species, such as the little bittern and the white heron which have appeared as a result of the intervention. The hydraulic functioning of the basins is based on the principle of gravity, a factor that has made it possible not to impact on land consumption by constructing particularly bulky engineering works such as pumping stations. Native plant species have been used for reforestation works in order to increase the ecological value of the area.

The participatory and multi-sectoral approach has been a particularly important component in the multi-year process of this project: on the one hand it has represented an example of territorial solidarity, since the inhabitants of the municipalities involved have seen an infrastructure being built on their territory to serve communities downstream of the intervention site; on the other hand the consensus among institutions and residents has been motivated by the participatory process led by a local NGO. The involvement of local stakeholders has also led to the creation of virtuous dynamics at the management level: the farmers to whom the agricultural land has been expropriated have in fact been involved in the maintenance of the park through the periodic removal of timber and cutting of brushwood.

The great fruitive value of the area has leveraged the territorial character of the Lura Park, managed by a consortium of 12 municipalities,; moreover it has been animated by a vision inspired by sustainability, which has privileged slow mobility as the only form of accessibility to the area and has promoted the divulgation of a green infrastructure such as this one through a square that illustrates the functioning of the basins, various birdwatching stations and a direct connection with the nearby Biodiversity Centre, managed by the park authority. This project does not only support the functioning of its surrounding but even cultivates the natural heritage and the consciousness of its users.

Urban regeneration

In an era in which cities are becoming increasingly difficult to codify and are experiencing unchecked levels of demographic growth and consumption of public land, the free space provides an opportunity to creatively react to re-establish human’s ancient connection to the soil.

The Portello project is located on the former site of the Alfa Romeo and Lancia workshops. This area represents the new gateway to the north of the city, leading towards the motorway and relating to the indications of Gino Valle's Intervention Plan, based on a large diagonal. The park covers about 70,000 square metres and, representing a threshold and a connection between the fairgrounds and the new Piazza Mercato, can be considered a landmark of access to the metropolitan system.

Together with Charles Jencks we have jointly designed the morphological modelling of the park, which forms a system in diagonal continuity with Monte Stella, the historic artificial hill designed by Piero Bottoni after World War II. This new topography enabled us to recover part of excavation soil and demolition debris on site through layering under the three mounds and under the whole park, that is uplifted few meters upon surrounding streets. The layout of the mounds and walls created a peaceful island among disturbing traffic flowing on the two express ways bordering the site.

What are we waiting for?

The need of an ecological transition became inevitable over the past years. Regional, national, and European laws and policies have been developed along the path that started with the Birds Directive in 1979 and led to the more recent EU Strategy on Adaptation to Climate Change in February 2021. Together with the European Green Deal, the Renovation Wave or the NextGeneration EU programme, the New European Bauhaus initiative is part of the fundamental campaign of the European Commission to implement sustainable standards at all levels of society, industry, and policy. The initiative was declared by President Ursula von der Leyen in her “State of the Union” speech in September 2020 and promotes the prompt improvement of our living spaces, focusing on sustainability, aesthetics, and inclusion. The goal is to improve the living conditions with long term perspective, tackling housing, public space, production, and transport. In March 2021 the UN adopted a new statistical framework for Natural Capital Accounting6 which allows countries worldwide to track changes in ecosystems and their services. Supported by scientific evidence of a Knowledge Innovation Project (KIP) by the European Commission7, it enables the complementation of existing economic accounts with natural capital accounts. This is a ground-breaking change of economic reporting and embeds the important contribution of natural capital to the world’s economy.

The financial tools to realize this new balance are already available and making this new approach tangible to people is important to cultivate identity, social relations, and urban connections. Our LAND approach of bringing people back to nature and raise awareness on ecosystems services has been manifested in the cultural and environmental strategy for the city of Essen and the Ruhr region, the development of Lura retention park and the Masterplan Litorale-Domitio Flegreo and led to the elaboration of a new environmental consciousness – tangible, intelligible and sustainable. We are grateful to discover this level of engagement and openness to natural solutions on such high political level and eager to contribute to the climate-oriented transition that we are heading.