La natura in città. Tra storia e contemporaneità

The climatic, environmental and anthropic changes that characterize the current period, constitute a fundamental theme in the urban and architectural debate, since they condition on the one hand the safeguarding of territories, landscapes and fragile urban contexts, on the other the uses, performance and efficiency of architectural artefacts and everyday objects. We must keep in mind that, historically, the city has always had a close relationship with nature: the medieval historical centers with the vegetable gardens inside the walls, the parks and gardens in the nineteenth-century extensions, the green in the urbanism of the modern movement; periods in which the cities were not overcrowded, while today, considering that more than two thirds of European citizens live in the city, this relationship has weakened, to the detriment of a massive expansion in agricultural and naturalistic areas. Faced with these issues, which increasingly take place in our life, we ask ourselves the question of how to make cities more resilient and able to counteract and mitigate climate changes and their consequences, both short and medium term. A possible perspective is to provide the cities with plans that address sustainable development and direct the direction towards “green” cities, with a continuous connection and ecological environmental features, reflecting on the statement of the European Commissioner for the Environment, Karmenu Vella "Green cities make more: they offer a better quality of life to their inhabitants and new business opportunities". The contribution aims to set a reflection on the potential of "green" as the urban regulation of the city, focusing on the quality of cities and on the complex strategies to be pursued, both in terms of intervention scales (structural and process ) that of fields of action (economic, environmental, social), to be implemented with continuity over time and in compliance with the specificities of the contexts.