Infrastrutture e territorio: nuovi paradigmi

Infrastructural networks represent one of the key challenges to the future development of contemporary societies. They are a precious tool for triggering economic dynamics and re- establishing social and environmental equilibriums in the articulated and complex structure of anthropically developed territories. Finally, they are an opportunity to improve living conditions, reduce sprawl and degradation and guarantee the fair use of territories and cities by everyone. In a country like Italy, where the richness and variety of the environment created by art and offered by nature clash with an excessive use of land and the constantly increasing fragility of the territory, a different approach to the design of infrastructure would truly represent an occasion to safeguard and promote the landscape and an important possibility for relaunching the economy. In addition to mobility infrastructures and their strategic importance in connecting, providing access to and requalifying entire urban areas, this approach must also embrace infrastructures tied to the management and control of water systems, landfills, waste treatment facilities, waste to energy plants, etc. Each of these structures has a notable environmental, economic and social impact. Also, it is well known that each represents a particularly sensitive topic for Italian society today, requiring the definition of targeted political-economic strategies and a capillary commitment to informing and sharing projects with local communities. We need only to consider the infrastructures serving waste collection networks, in need of urgent responses that take the form of concrete solutions founded on relationships with context at different scales and the scale of the city. Implications range from the scale of the home to the building, to the neighbourhood and to the regional scale, with consequent impacts on the environment, formalisation and acceptance by society. To date, the majority of facilities dedicated to the complex system of collecting, sorting and disposing of waste, built in Italy based on an exclusively technicist logic, have generated only feelings of risk, mistrust and hostility. This system of different facilities needs to be reconsidered, reintroducing the formal and symbolic values that have been erroneously neglected and taking advantage of the opportunities these structures can trigger within a broader perspective focused on requalifying urban areas and promoting and protecting the environment. To validate these necessities and indicate possible new approaches to their design, this issue of the magazine offers a selection of the latest generation of waste treatment and water management facilities. Projects at different scales, in some cases very large that, beyond technological and functional necessities, lay claim to their own expressive value. Projects that are integrated within their contexts and introduce new functions, healing large areas of land and returning it to society. While waste management infrastructures, whose need to respond to a relatively new set of problems are unable to benefit from consolidated examples, are searching for new paradigms and formal models, water infrastructures, in particular those designed to ensure the proper management of rainwater and runoff, have taken on a new appearance with respect to those of the past. No longer the exclusive arena of engineering, they are now dynamic and multifunctional works of architecture. More than simple devices to ensure the safety of the territory and reduce levels of risk caused by the poor management of meteorological phenomena, they are now public spaces, meeting points and parks that regenerate large abandoned areas, re- stitch existing fabrics and trigger new social, economic and cultural processes. This is the case of a number of exemplary projects that break away from traditional typologies to experiment with new approaches to design, such as that by West 8 in the floodplains of Noordwaard in the Netherlands (97), a landscape that changes with the seasons and the level of water, or Luming Park in Quzhou, China, by Turenscape (89). This Chinese project builts a complex topography, spread across 32 hectares of natural areas along the western edge of the river, confronting and resolving different problems based on a systemic vision: remediation of a once unhealthy and abandoned floodplain by creating an ecological infrastructure that regulates flooding in the river environment, offers new public spaces, integrates agricultural production and generates a new productive landscape. Aside from being a pressing necessity, it is also hoped that Italy will begin to plan interventions with a similar vision, capable of uniting the need to care for the territory with the quality of architecture and the wellbeing of citizens. The projects and the research presented on the following pages are intended as a starting point for this debate and a stimulus to move in this new direction.