Linking Territories. Rurality, Landscape and Urban borders.

Rural areas close to the urban fabric no longer serve their adjacent towns as they once did when the link between town and the surrounding countryside was fully intertwined and they were economically interdependent and, in a sense, symbiotic. For decades, the relation between the production of food and energy and their consumption at the base of the economy has completely changed, alongside the balance between landscape and built environment. Many contemporary projects are still the result of a traditional application of the principles of division and segmentation of the inhabited area, although a change in this attitude is in progress in many elds of our increasingly interconnected daily life. We need to imagine new connections and links: temporal-space links, territorial and economic links. Temporal-space links are concerned with the creation of new links between urban and rural milieus as a means to regenerate places in space and time, as effective sustainable urban projects do, whenever they are able to tackle critical situations and to reimagine territories to create new value. Furthermore, urban agriculture must be a way to rethink and recycle the potentials of urban transformation. The city of Milan and the areas between the compact city and the surrounding countryside, in particular in the western part of its territory (stretching from the Expò area to the Parco Agricolo Sud Milano, passing through several parks like Parco di Trenno and Parco delle Cave), is an interesting case study to look at when investigating the relationship between the urban and the rural. This book collects the outcomes of the workshop 'Linking territories. Rurality, landscape and urban borders' conjointly organised by the PhD course in Urban Planning, Design and Policy (UPDP) at the Politecnico di Milano and the Post-Master "Architecture des Milieux" at the Ecole Spéciale d'Architecture de Paris. The workshop has had a double aim; to widen the view of the relationship between urban and rural areas by involving different groups of research and practice, and to define experimental proposals able to imagine new spaces for the co-habitation of urban and rural ways of life, in the end redefining the concept of rurality and its relation with the urban condition.
 Carried out from May until September 2015, the workshop focused on the western part of the city of Milan. Three areas in particular have been explored: Muggiano, Boscoincittà / Parco delle Cave / Parco di Trenno and Piazza d'Armi / Parco Parri / Calchi Taeggi.