Titolo MAKE NATURE PUBLIC
Typology University thesis
Year 2016
Project site Ionic Coast Calabria
The research focuses on the possibilities of architectural intervention in the marginal urban edges in Rome: the Roman historical periphery, born with the popular housing and illegal constructions, clashes with the lack of an urban vision for the city. The landscape is hybrid, a landscape of differences, where large natural and agricultural areas are dotted with traces of the past, infrastructures, ruins and archeology, absorbed by the unstoppable expansion of the city.
In a region where the cultivated fields and forests occupy 89% of the territory, the landscape can be an active factor to improve the cohesion of the double countries system. The rivers system, seasonal rivers, connects the Regional Park of the Calabrian Serre and the coast that goes from Badolato to Riace, allowing you to bypass the infrastucture barrier created by the Statale 106 and the railway. They represent the only transversal element, that if exploited, provides permeability to a landscape fragmented by abandonment and torn by the infrastructure. The project consists of two strategies: the definition of an Ecological Corridor defined by the Gallipari fiumara and the Fluvial Park on the Vodà fiumara.
The first aim is to preserve the species of fauna and flora present in the region. The Corridor, in fact, is an area for animals and plants, where man is the intruder and, by intervening in some places, he can observe what nature produces.
The Fluvial Park of the fiumara Vodà connects Badolato Superiore and Badolato Marina, through a path equipped with micro-architecture in wood and a development intervention of the river bank. Bridges, viewpoints, info points are moments of stasis of the man who captures the landscape collage of the rural area of Calabria.
The development of the embankment allows to avoid flooding the agricultural fields in the autumn and spring months and to slow down the dangerous process of degradation that afflicts this type of landscape. These two interventions are connected to each other by a knitted agricultural territory and represent two pilot projects that can be reiterated all along the coast where the rivers represent the supporting connections.
The reading of the landscape took place through the understanding of the elements LINES, SURFACES and POINTS, which overlapped, well describe the complexity of the landscape from Badolato to Riace. The projects appropriated these terms to convert them into intervention tools.
The lines are represented by the pedestrian paths, designed ex novo or traced on existing ones. The surfaces are represented by the multitude of cultivated fields and the homogeneous forest that extends from the Parco delle Serre to embrace the Gallipari river. The Points are micro architectures: objects of attraction along the rivers, a quarry, a waterfall or the ancient ruins.