Né città, né campagna. Un terzo territorio per una società paesaggista. From agricultural space to urban countryside Not city nor yet countryside. A third territory for a landscape society. In Mininni M. (a cura di), Dallo spazio agricolo alla campagna urbana

The present article, as well as the dossier it introduces, is focused on periurban agricultural land. It describes most of the pictures produced by the contemporary city and its sprawling edges, but also those due to a growing tendency to settle in the countryside. The countryside has always been characterized by slow growth processes and low settlement density, but it is now being affected by new social and economic practices that are transforming rural culture into a hybrid urban-rural form. Among these pictures evolving from different processes of rarefaction and densification of the urban space, both centrifugal and decentralized, the aim in the present work is to make an in-depth examination of the space containing them, often ignored in contemporary urbanist culture because it has not been educated to recognize these aspects. This space is not referable as suburban, an imperfect city produced by its spatial contiguity to the true city, nor can it be regarded as a re-urbanization phenomenon because it is not generated by a sudden hypertrophy of rural settlements sprawling into the countryside and extending into adjacent urban tentacles Even the different forms of agriculture produced by these periurban spaces have their own, innovative character. Unlike those of rural agriculture, which is indifferent to city models, they have drawn creative economic and social models deriving from the ongoing transformation of the rural world but above all from their proximity to the city, inspired by the citizens’ desire to return to nature and to occupy their leisure hours in pleasurable natural pursuits. From some standpoints, it might be possible to describe this as a new form of suburb, apluralistsuburb, not only urban, built out from the city, but also rural, moving in from the countryside, and thus building a “third territory” halfway between the urban and the rural. This research is an open invitation to town planners to pay a greater attention to this in between agricultural space, awarding it a greater autonomy.