Ruralizing the Urban Envelope: Experimental Tools to Cultivate the City

Promoting the integration of agriculture into urban areas could represent an ethical and social achievement in the short term; in this way, consistently with the provisions of the UN SDG (Sustainable Development Goals), the new generations will not be disconnected from rural reality and the resulting micro-productions could represent a contribution to overcoming the population social gap (UN SDG 2 “Zero hunger,” 11 “Sustainable cities and communities” and 12 “Responsible consumption and production”). Starting from this assumption, the paper resents some results of an ongoing research project, called BioLoop, aimed at laying the foundations for the activation of local micro-economies in the southern periphery of Milan. The paper presents a method and tools to support hyperlocal design, i.e., based on the energy and material resources available within a radius of 1 km. The results presented show the application of such tools to an urban portion of the southern outskirts of the city, taking as a case study a square that hosts student housing and other public buildings. In particular, the paper focuses on the first steps of the application and implementation of experimental tools: the local Atlas of Energy and Materials (AEM) and some of the proposals inside the Open-Source Projects Hub (OSPH). AEM and OSPH are products of the Bioloop project, and the applied design solutions of the OSPH are based on the use of locally available resources, both in terms of secondary material and renewable energies. These solutions refer, in particular, to devices for cultivation on both vertical and horizontal impervious surfaces and to a mobile collective kitchen for the transformation of food potentially produced by the same devices. In addition to the representation of the design solutions, some quantitative results on the impacts of these devices on the urban metabolism of the area are presented, both in terms of material cycles (water and nutrients) and renewable energies.