Garden as Paradise: Islamic garden as a paradigm for the rediscovery of the hidden value of residual urban spaces

A wake-up bell that reminds us to ‟stop and think” when hurry or laziness seem to prevail: this is nature for man. Reinserting nature into urban space means restoring contact with a world that does not respond to our laws and reminds us of the right and necessary times.Garden constitutes the elementary unity, complementary to the urban fabric and capable of adapting to it: ‟Closed world, indefinitely malleable, the garden embodies the old dream of the microcosm. It is structured, consciously, like the image, on a human scale, of the boundless Cosmos, which for its immensity is subtracted from the direct action of men” (P.Grimal, L’ arte dei giardini, p.4) The tradition of the Islamic garden offers ideas and strategies to recreate oases of calm in the chaos of the urban desert and to generate small paradises distributed in the urban fabric, where imagination finds its space.