Il contributo dell’arte ambientale al progetto di rigenerazione dello spazio pubblico.Learning from New York

Environmental artists and creatives, interested in depicting in their works the structure and functioning of living ecosystems, are being brought to the table to discuss urban planning with design professionals. The separate traditions of arts, ecology and urban design has been finding a common idiom toward improving public space and urban conditions. It was not until the second half of the XX century that artists and designers refocused attention on the multiple relationships between environmental issues, public consciousness, and aesthetics. They began to challenge traditional limits and started considering degraded sites and landfills as settings of artwork, sport and recreation facilities, eye-catching monuments in the urban landscape. New York City “Percent for Art” program is a design reclamation project for Fresh Kills, a 900-hectare site in Staten Island, and the largest landfill in the nation. An innovative land regeneration approach that transform an existing landfill into a productive, safe, inviting, and publicly accessible green infrastructure. And a cultural heritage site, able to bring urbanites closer to each other and the renewed site by integrating educational, sport and recreational activities within the everyday urban environment. This on-going, long-term regeneration project represents a disruptive and creative way to develop workable plans and strategies aimed at transforming the liability of environmentally degraded spaces into socially attractive commons, in which everyone participates. The “Percent for Art” project, levering on the environmental art of Mierle Laderman Ukeles, is generating new public spaces for lively encounters and exchange, binding together actions, experience and theoretical discourse, which support and forge long term co-operative practices and partnerships. Freshkills Park is set to become an environmental beacon and a theme public park on recycling for children and adults, tapping into a global concern.