Designing temporal and spatial connections for landscape enhancement

The progressive stratification of visions around the man-nature relationship, and the relative critical issues connected to it, makes the identification of a multidisciplinary and flexible design attitude increasingly urgent. It is deemed necessary to carry out constant critical work at the intersection between nature and culture, moving within the landscape through a holistic approach and paying appropriate attention to all those aspects, even the most ephemeral, which contribute to the formation of the territory as perceived in everyday life. These issues find space for reflection in the design experience recently addressed by the Mantua Campus of the Polytechnic of Milan, which analyses the case of the “Prati Stabili” of the Mincio Valley (Lombardy, Italy) as an exceptional rural context and emblematic example of heterogeneity. The particularity of this green system lies in the ability to express an agricultural landscape that manifests a certain complexity both in ecological and identity terms. In other words, it is the result of a particular synergy between various favorable naturalistic conditions and a constant carefully measured anthropic action. This permanent cultivation is therefore assumed as an agent capable of influencing the compactness of the territorial structure, and therefore the connection between the vast rural spaces and the smaller widespread urban realities, and the transmission of local values as a clear expression of a community in continuity between past and future. The design aims to support the complex heritage connected to the meadow system through the rethinking of connections and relations, tangible and intangible, in a system of differently extended areas with a high level of heterogeneity.