Authors:Lucina Caravaggi Pages: 5 - 25 Abstract: The term co-evolution forces us to reflect on the transformation of the meaning of some terms, linked to the profound changes of our time and very relevant for the design disciplines. Starting from the role that some relational models have had within the landscape project up to the uncertain relationships that the project maintains with contemporary landscapes, this essay deals with dynamic interweaving of lines and nodes in continuous evolution, as suggested from Tim Ingold's metaphor. The new landscapes require new interpretative references connected to the change in meaning of three main and constitutive terms of modern thought: nature, earth, evolution. The great separation between 'nature and culture', which shows a disturbing permanence in our disciplinary field, has been outlined in the belief that it represents a serious obstacle to the start up of new explorations and imaginations. Some hints on the Gaia Hypothesis follow, images of “forces in action” regulated by principles of reciprocity that has managed to defeat the idea of the planet as a sink, or a container. An idea that is rooted in modern thought, and which has made the boundaries between humans and non-humans increasingly blurred. With respect to the themes of evolution, I mentioned the need to contrast the imaginary of Darwinian origin,-based on natural selection (harden over the last century without any responsibility of the great biologist!), in favor of collateral forms of change, creative strategies of survival that slip away the classical gradualism of evolution theories, synthetically recalling Gould's research. In the second part of this editorial, I traced a possible interpretative geography of the contributions hosted in the issue, a map that overall appears very interesting for what it shows, and for what it hides. It is divided into 4 sections called: garden laboratories, resistances, dynamisms, reconciliations. Finally, I have highlighted some key terms from the texts by Laura Boella and Kristina Hill that can be useful for drawing new maps, orienting our design explorations. PubDate: 2023-02-23 DOI: 10.36253/rv-14310 Issue No:Vol. 20, No. 2 (2023)
Authors:Laura Boella Pages: 30 - 35 Abstract: Talking about empathy today is not easy. the word seems to get lost in a sky fool of good intentions, the utopia of a better world, and all-purpose sayings. Empathy has become a key word of our time and resonates more and more often in the crisis situations that relentlessly plague our societies. My work on empathy has been nurtured by the conviction that the importance of this human capacity in the contemporary world stems from the fact that it is not the solution, as many think, but the problem. I therefore proposed a new paradigm, that of empathies, which considers the multiplicity of concrete experiences, lived in changing contexts, of contact with people, objects, non-human beings. There are many forms of individual and collective experience that have an empathic quality. At the same time, they go beyond, as they intersect with other levels and planes of experience which produce ever tighter links between justice, equality, vulnerability of human bodies and of the natural environment. This means being open to the richness of reality. Empathy is a capacity with which we are all endowed, but it is developed and practiced in very different ways, depending on the individual and, in particular, on the social, cultural situation in which each of us lives. Not only that: in the empathic experience, time, the duration of an encounter count, and similarly the space, the architecture of a place. PubDate: 2023-02-23 DOI: 10.36253/rv-13990 Issue No:Vol. 20, No. 2 (2023)
Authors:Kristina Hill Pages: 36 - 47 Abstract: Haraway and others have suggested reciprocity with the non-human world is a pathway to un- derstanding our humanness. Two urgent trends accelerate our need for this reciprocity: the first is the COVID-19 pandemic as a harbinger of future pandemics, and the second is our changing planetary climate. Our present time is increasingly becoming a “present-future,” linked irreversibly by scientific models to specific future states of our planet and local regions. At the same time our bodies are co-evolving with a virus in a global reciprocal process with no end in sight, collapsing our sense of scale and separation among bodies. A long view of time in the past could act as a counterbalance to this experience. Bringing the longue durée model of time into our present requires reestablishing our knowledge of a long-term past in which humans adapted to major changes in climate earlier in the Holocene. Forms of future urban adaptation can embody reci- procity by emphasizing strategies that anticipate change rather than seeking to prevent it, leap- ing forward in time to embrace global changes we are no longer able to prevent. PubDate: 2023-02-23 DOI: 10.36253/rv-14002 Issue No:Vol. 20, No. 2 (2023)
Authors:Elena Antoniolli Pages: 50 - 63 Abstract: The article explores the role of decay and its distinctive temporalities, highlighting the need to deal with change, randomness and disorder, to cultivate an attitude open to non-human other- ness, as part of an expanded concept of agency. The decomposition process of the dead tree as an access key to illustrate the importance of reasoning on co-becoming for the landscape project. A relationship that undoes the form, tears it apart, and infects it with otherness. Decomposing is a useful conceptual tool for thinking about biological diversity in the city and for changing the very vocabulary of the project, towards the concept of contamination. The article investigates the saproxylic insects, to discuss some methodologies aimed at interspecies practice, such as decentralizing human-centred ethics, adopting the animal point of view and hypothesizing the queering of the conventional canons of public space. PubDate: 2023-02-23 DOI: 10.36253/rv-13392 Issue No:Vol. 20, No. 2 (2023)
Authors:Cristina Imbroglini, Anna Lei Pages: 64 - 79 Abstract: More and more wild animals find refuge in cities, due to the growth of urbanized areas, the devastation of natural habitats and the intensive transformation of agricultural spaces. The presence of wildlife increases conflicts but is also generating interesting considerations on the relationship between man and nature, based on empathy and the comprehension of animal. New co-evolution paths within cities, anthropic habitat par excellence, imply a different way of relating to the ‘wild’ or ‘feral’ to produce generative alliances and new shared habitat. The landscape project must come out of the comfort zone of a design conceived exclusively for human consumption and well-being: spaces of interspecies co-operation (productive symbiosis), generating responses of mutual adaptation to environmental and climatic changes; new places of co-habitat for both humans and animals; immersive spaces, for empathic and emotional cognition capable to sensitizing became aware of the interconnections between all living species and their common habitat. PubDate: 2023-01-27 DOI: 10.36253/rv-13741 Issue No:Vol. 20, No. 2 (2023)
Authors:Emanuela Morelli Pages: 80 - 95 Abstract: Living in complexity and being part of it, becoming self-aware, recognizing the other’s right to existence, embodying nature in oneself as a natural, obvious and everyday fact depends, as Edgar Morin said, on our educational system. To do this, we need to activate a process that focuses on direct experience with what surrounds us, and in particular with nature, remembering that education is the kindling of a flame, not the filling of a vessel. Starting from some contemporary principle, especially from the Edgar Morin’s ‘reliance’ and the Gilles Clément’s ‘planetary garden’ and ‘terrestrial citizenship’, the research goes back in time and attempts a reinterpretation of some of the founding principles of Maria Montessori’s thought. This sees the garden as a privileged place for experimenting with an educational system capable of developing in human beings a greater awareness of themselves and their surroundings. In ‘our garden’, Montessori’s ideal place for a cosmic education, “The great law that regulates life in cosmos is that of collaboration between all beings” (Montessori, 2004). PubDate: 2023-02-23 DOI: 10.36253/rv-13733 Issue No:Vol. 20, No. 2 (2023)
Authors:Roberto Pasini Pages: 96 - 107 Abstract: Different disciplinary fields have contributed to expand the semantic area of the term ‘coevolution’, from classical biology to philosophical reflections, to the most recent debates on the col- lapse of planetary ecology. Today, the discourse on coevolution focuses on the urge to redefine the relationship between human society and nature and to consistently coordinate the spatial trans- formations imposed by the former upon the latter. In this text, two opposite perspectives on how to re-imagine the spatial organization of the Earth are compared: anthropic withdrawal from half the planet vs. construction of a technologically governed natural-anthropic assemblage. These perspectives directly engage the ambit of the practices and the objectives of landscape design. Two cases of reform of large landscape systems, representative of such opposite positions, are analyzed. Concluding remarks hypothesize forms of constructive synergy between such approaches, philosophically evoked, proactively formulated, but still distant from an operative implementation. PubDate: 2023-02-23 DOI: 10.36253/rv-13360 Issue No:Vol. 20, No. 2 (2023)
Authors:Linda Grisoli, JieXi Goh Pages: 110 - 121 Abstract: The dawn of Anthropocene saw the birth of nuclear landscapes (NL): places heavily contaminated by radioactivity, left behind by human interventions. From nuclear weapon production to detonation sites and atomic power plants, unfortunate events had resulted in environmental catastrophes, turning these NLs into forbidden gardens - off-limits frontiers of waste. Human absence promoted NL to metamorphose into post-nuclear landscapes, characterized by a primal image of nature: pristine and spontaneous. It is an unreleased kind of wilderness, a living archive of human ecocides. Later, governmental interventions gradually transformed these sites into Nuclear Landscape Monuments (NLM), making them embodiments of degradation and redemption. The essay investigates the evolution of these nuclear environments and their wild ambivalent nature. It further elucidates the shift in humans’ attitudes towards nature, through an atomic narrative: from production and destruction to recovery and reconciliation. The essay also highlights the role of anthropogenic and natural agencies in establishing this intricate co-existing relationship between humans and non-humans. PubDate: 2023-02-23 DOI: 10.36253/rv-13291 Issue No:Vol. 20, No. 2 (2023)
Authors:Maria Chiara Libreri Pages: 122 - 137 Abstract: What can be a model of urban development congenial to the human, plant and animal population' Is it possible to implement a model that is useful in our time' The article focuses on the critical analysis of an agroecosystem dating back to the Maya population and aims to obtain useful information on the relationships between human settlements and natural habitats. Starting from the agroecosystem of corn cultivation used in Mesoamerica, we intend to investigate the symbiotic relationship between indigenous agricultural communities and the ecosystem in which they are located. The investigation of the relationship between forest, settlements and agricultural production of a pre-Columbian civilization is the starting point for a broader reflection on the issue of co-habitation in the expanding city towards complex ecosystems, rich in natural biodiversity. The work here presented is the result of what emerged during a field work carried out in 2018 in the Mexican peninsula of Yucatan, the story of encounters that shows the negotiation between different beings: plants, men and even spirits, result in a complex ecosystem. PubDate: 2023-02-23 DOI: 10.36253/rv-13365 Issue No:Vol. 20, No. 2 (2023)
Authors:Maria Livia Olivetti Pages: 138 - 149 Abstract: Palermo is a lot of landscapes. It is a geography of exaggerated places able to generate a condition of constant wonder in those who cross it. The many souls of different peoples who have inhabited it and who still inhabit it constitute a mosaic made of very close and uncovered relationships between plants, animals, men, sea and light. This contribution aims to explore - not in an exhaustive way - some conditions of coexistence that have been observed within the open spaces of the city (in particular of its Kalsa district). They are interesting because show us how spontaneous links between different species and objects (mostly ruins of the Second World War) constitute places of unprecedented beauty and social cohesion functioning in complex urban tis- sues. In front of this evidence there is the need to establish new interpretative categories of the existing, in order to generate a taxonomy. It could identify the possible active roles that the relationships and coexistences already acting can have within the project of the city (turning them into gardens, for example) and which ones should be defused because they are harmful to the inhabitants and to nature PubDate: 2023-02-23 DOI: 10.36253/rv-13292 Issue No:Vol. 20, No. 2 (2023)
Authors:Gabriele Paolinelli, Marco Cei, Nicoletta Cristiani, Ludovica Marinaro, Flavia Veronesi, Caterina Liverani Pages: 152 - 175 Abstract: In a present deteriorated by the anthropocentric illusion of domination over Nature, imagining the change of a landscape in a perspective of coevolution is part of a broader contemporary movement of scientific and social culture. The conditions and dynamics of a plain area belonging to the Ombrone stream in Pistoia are emblematic as a case study for the criticalities and risks they present. It is intuitive that the transformation of the area into an urban park can be an effective antidote to its current inability to respond to contemporary needs, but how such a process can be initiated and sustained is a question with many significant variables. This article proposes some research results relating to the design of the plant change of places as a possible cornerstone of a process of generating the park understood as a co-evolutionary response based on the properties of the landscape to which it belongs. PubDate: 2023-02-23 DOI: 10.36253/rv-13305 Issue No:Vol. 20, No. 2 (2023)
Authors:Marta Rabazo Martin Pages: 176 - 191 Abstract: The aim of this paper is to analyze the role of nature and man-made landscapes in the work of landscape architect Diana Balmori. With regard to some of her less published projects we can understand how the idea of an intimate continuity between the whole Ambiental system, includ- ing the man being nature, underlays in each of them, following a conductive line from the small to the large scale. This multiscale continuity can foster a coevolution: the model to follow is no longer based on division and local solutions but on the idea of blurring limits and connecting with natural systems creating an intimate whole. That implies also inverting the relationship between nature and city: imitate the functioning of natural engineering systems instead of leaving dif- fused fragments of nature in the city. PubDate: 2023-02-23 DOI: 10.36253/rv-13317 Issue No:Vol. 20, No. 2 (2023)
Authors:Thania Sakellariou Pages: 192 - 203 Abstract: If the 20th century produced the idea of altered landscapes, the 21st century, within the discipline of landscape, seems to be experimenting with complex and innovative ways, assemblages to build relational landscapes in which ecosystem thinking assumes an important role in mediation to think and act with the living. New fields of inquiry arise for the project, in which the fundamental concepts of ecology such as discontinuity, instability, grafting, hybridization and interference are integrated with the plurality of the living, from plant forms to the worlds perceived by animals, to the processes of agents on biotic and non-biotic forms. Rather than mimicry, they offer a model of agency, of incomplete- ness and openness. The proposed contribution intends to raise some conceptual and operational reflections within the contemporary landscape project and the current debate, critically analyzing the project of the Parc des Ateliers in Arles, placing at the center the theme of co-presence as a field of revelation of the relational dimension, towards a new negotiation between man and nature, between artistic knowledge and scientific knowledge. PubDate: 2023-02-23 DOI: 10.36253/rv-13331 Issue No:Vol. 20, No. 2 (2023)
Authors:Carlotta Olivari, Margherita Pasquali Pages: 204 - 215 Abstract: Inspired by Donna Haraway’s concept of Making Kind, the investigation of the relationships between different objects of nature and non-nature subjected to today’s climate change is born. Looking today at the transformations of the planet, Chile represents an exemplary case study. Within its particular geomorphological condition, it is impossible to exclude the continuous evolution separating humans from other living species. This integration is the rise of campamentos, Chilean informal settlements. This contribution investigates the natural processes and informality in Chile through the lens of Landscape ecology. Specifically, it analyses the symbiotic relationship between the informal development and the morphological conformation of the natural Chilean context, with the consequent intersection of the inhabited space and the natural one. PubDate: 2023-02-23 DOI: 10.36253/rv-13336 Issue No:Vol. 20, No. 2 (2023)
Authors:Francesco Airoldi, Giulia Azzini Pages: 218 - 231 Abstract: The proposed contribution imagines architecture as a means for the development of marginal territories affected by fragilities, bringing the theme of co-evolution back to the complex and still strongly discussed one of reconciliation between communities and territories. Removing cultural and social barriers to generate an empathetic vision of the environmental transformations taking place, through an investigation of the possibilities offered by architectural and landscape design by paying special attention to new research horizons of environmental sustainability, it is possible to generate cohabitation processes sensitive to the issues of co-evolution and co-existence between nature and humans. The aim is to identify sustainable and effective design strategies to bridge the gap between in- habitants and territory, to trigger virtuous dynamics of demographic, productive and social revitalization in those places characterized by territorial fragilities related to depopulation. PubDate: 2023-02-23 DOI: 10.36253/rv-13327 Issue No:Vol. 20, No. 2 (2023)
Authors:Simona Calvagna Pages: 232 - 253 Abstract: The oldest living specimen of Dracaena draco subsp. draco, an endemism of the Canary Island and Madera, whose health had been threatened by the urban development of the neighbouring town of Icod de los Vinos, in the north of Tenerife, at the end of the last century was at the centre of a choral process involving politicians, inhabitants and designers, aimed at restoring, through the design of a park in its surroundings, the thermophilic forest conditions of its original habitat. At a time when attention to environmental issues still constituted a niche research field, the park project aimed to re-establish, in a co-evolutive logic, not only the ecological relations of the tree with its environment, but also the network of myths and legends that link the long-lived Canary Island Dragon specimen to the local population. The study traces and illustrates the reasons of the project through an original photographic apparatus, enriched by drawings and considerations deriving from documentary research supplemented by conversations with the author of the work. PubDate: 2023-02-23 DOI: 10.36253/rv-13362 Issue No:Vol. 20, No. 2 (2023)
Authors:Adriano Dessì, João Gomes da Silva Pages: 254 - 269 Abstract: The paper refers to research and projects shared between Sardinian and Portuguese agricultural landscapes which, starting from the continuous investigation of this common cultural matrix, try to trace an evolutionary line of the historicized ways of co-evolutionary landscape construction and foreshadow some possible scenarios of continuity. In particular, the paper will focus on two projects by the Global Arquitectura Pajsagista studio in Alentejo, in which the approach to the study of the place can refer to a multi-scale methodology that links the study of the historical uses of agricultural landscapes, with the understanding of physical structures and evolution of vegetation cover foreshadowing a new idea of space starting from the interaction between man and these two dominant ones. With respect to these two topics declined in the “man-soil” and “man-living beings” relationship, it can be said that agricultural projects - and this is historically true, but even more so today - argued exactly the necessary meeting between utilitarian practices and symbolic of the primary productive activities of man with the “self poietic” and “ecological” regenerative dynamics of a specific way of organizing the terrestrial space. The presented cases, in fact, try to show the landscape design ability, into the rural Mediterranean areas, to activate co-evolution processes between the regeneration of agricultural soils and the human needs of inhabiting linked to leisure and refreshment. PubDate: 2023-02-23 DOI: 10.36253/rv-13343 Issue No:Vol. 20, No. 2 (2023)
Authors:Kevin Santus, Stefano Sartorio, Arianna Scaioli Pages: 270 - 291 Abstract: The contribution presents the results of a design driven research about the topic of co-evolution between space, nature and society, focusing on a Milanese fringe, in which human activities and natural capital co-exist with no dialogue. The project assumes the new European Bauhaus as a framework, reflecting upon the spatialization of theoretical instances aimed at the physical impacts of a co-evolutionary transformation. The output of the research is the promotion of design actions for a resilient landscape prototype, linking productive activities to natural and social capital, through circular and Nature-based solutions. Thus, attention is given to spatial configurations that aim to increase biodiversity in human settlement, through the design of ecological corridors, and to inclusiveness, in the redesign of former industrial facilities and local community habitats. PubDate: 2023-02-23 DOI: 10.36253/rv-13328 Issue No:Vol. 20, No. 2 (2023)
Authors:Ludovica Marinaro Pages: 297 - 304 Abstract: Promosso da quattro attori la cui sinergia valica confini amministrativi e scale, BORDESCAPES è il workshop internazionale sul tema della relazione tra Arsenale marittimo militare e la città di Spezia che si propone di essere il primo tassello di una ricerca progettuale più vasta e di un sodalizio duraturo. Dodici studenti, sotto il coordinamento dei docenti dei dipartimenti di Architettura delle Università di Firenze e di Liegi, si sono cimentati in un contatto intensivo con il tema della soglia e con la necessità di materializzarne (e smaterializzarne) significati, luci, ombre, ritmi e nuove nature. BORDERSCAPE è stato al contempo un'incursione e una fuga, un evento capace ovvero di portare l'attenzione internazionale alla scala locale e di far uscire la città dall'inviluppo del provincialismo. La news offre una cronaca da questo particolare bordo spezzino, raccontandone in parte la genesi ed un prolifico tentativo di innesco di un processo corale di re-immaginazione. PubDate: 2023-02-23 DOI: 10.36253/rv-14059 Issue No:Vol. 20, No. 2 (2023)
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