Avant Gardening to Grow the Green City

Changing lifestyles and consumption-production patterns as well as new highly efficient and soil-less cultivation techniques are evolving the way we design gardens within the city, making not only gardening but also farming possible in places where it was previously difficult or impossible. The garden can be conceived as a green infrastructure in the sense of a linked network of natural and semi-natural elements capable of providing multiple functions and ecosystem services with positive economic and social benefits not only for humans. The new productive green city not only consumes less, but is itself an autopoietic organism capable of addressing sustainability from an agrarian, architectural, landscape, but also sociological, psychological and educational point of view. Four case studies are used to argue whether verticalization is the best way to make cities greener, if the artificial reconfiguration of the environment can ever become a long-established practice, what benefits does urban green lose when vertical solutions are adopted instead of encouraging direct soil cultivation directly on the ground level.