Urban Open Spaces. Strategies for sustainable design.

The first moment of reflection and debate needs to clarify on the meaning of the terms through which it is possible to identify the research fields and their interrelations: landscape, environment and sustainability. Dealing with the first of them, the definition was clearly illustrated within the European Landscape Convention, despite the different meanings related to the linguistic differences. In many languages, instead, the origins of the term Environment evokes the idea of circularity. The environment itself represents, indeed, what an organism is surrounded and dealing with. The concept of sustainability is specifically linked with the skills of the ecology science, and expresses the main characteristic of an ecosystem: keeping alive the biodiversity and all of its ecological processes. Practically, it is possible to define a process as a sustainable one if it is able to exploit the natural resources, which are eventually naturally renewed. As a consequence, the community must control the consumption of the resources within the sustainable development. The relationship landscape environment is narrowly intertwined and interrelated. Concerning the architectural design, it can be argued that in the latest years the ecological principles for the sustainable development got familiar with the green building asset. The main goal, for both the design and the construction process, dealt with the energetic containment in particular, and more generally with the limitation on the environmental impacts. Even if, it is necessary to be aware that this is no longer possible nowadays. It’s essential redirect towards wider and detailed cultural and scientific fields; moreover it is not even longer possible to conceive working only on the building itself. It could be necessary moving from the building to the whole city perspective, gathering the entire urban landscape. It’s the right time. The city is going through a period of both crisis and evolution, sometimes involving severe, random and sudden transformation and variations. Actual transformations are enabling changes into functional assets and roles and pointing out new programmed and not connection nets. It is within this specific context, a very analytical and intentional one, that the public space gains a strategical key role for the urban planning, management and redevelopment. Independently from the functional aspects the public space, with all the different community places, gains fundamental position because of the place where they are located, the use of them, and because of the important contribute they share with the social and economical relationships. Day by day they are turning into reference points of the urban landscape. The themes connected to the sustainability, mostly related to the environmental issues, are actually present on the urban landscape and trying to recover lost elements and to provide new sources of innovation. Among the main factors, some of which need a deepened lecture and tests as well, on the front page stands the relationship between architecture and nature, taking charge of the role of the vegetation and the water above all. Considering this profile, trials on buildings have already provided a contribution to the tests on the effects they have on the environment. It can be useful to remind even in this case the necessary walk from the building to the city, but considering eventually a parallel approach: studies and researches on buildings and urban interventions. Coming to the open urban public spaces the procedures are now even more and more different. Evry kind of intervention needs to be compared and integrated within the ecological system to be finally called “sustainable” and to reach the aim of contributing and collaborating for the completion and the whole working of the environmental system.