The project of public space. Towards adaptive infrastructures for more flexible and ecological cities

The contribution aims to investigate, on the basis of projects and theories, the possibility of considering infrastructures and soil as project material and as a new portion of public space. While on the one hand, new technologies allow forms of digital socialization, creating a strong disenchantment with the metaverse and estrangement from reality. On the other hand, the quality of public spaces still seems to be strongly compromised by overly specialized places and the result of a twentieth-century design approach according to which they are inadequate for contemporary urban social welfare. Among these places, the roads and large infrastructure nodes which in many cases are truly autonomous metropolitan landscapes, play a central role. Their iconographic incident within the city introduces a scenario that obliterates the urban habitat and does not establish any direct relationship with it. The survey starts from the recognition of the French experience of the TVK studio within which the E-40 Brussels project questions the future and the alternative role of infrastructure. The goal is to evaluate the feasibility of these scenarios that rethink areas of public cities trapped and colonized by infrastructures from a more ecological perspective.