Abitare il territorio e costruire paesaggi

The context of cultural reference is that of the urban countryside, considered as a possible source of open spaces and a public asset for the city and its citizens. The reference is also to the debate that the École Nationale Superieure du Paysage of Versailles has long been conducting, and which has proven to be a particularly fertile terrain for interpreting and planning periurban agricultural landscapes in some southern Italian contexts, and indeed in Mediterranean contexts in general. The author edited the Italian edition of Campagnes urbaines by Pierre Donadieu, conceiving it as a complex editorial project to introduce to the Italian readers those well structured reflections of the French Versailles school, from a long standing commitment on these issues, but also to build project implications of the vicinity countryside in the disciplinary debate in defining the project of the contemporary city. The curatorship consisted, in addition to text translation, in writing a long preface, developing a glossary of terms between agriculture and urban planning, and creating boards of french agrarian parks and the presence of a new essay by Donadieu as an upgrade text for Italian readers. Finally, new photographs were selected, inserting images of urban campaigns to help the reader in the Italian translation of the text and to implement it into the Italian culture. In recent years, architects, urban planners, landscape architects and environmentalists are questioning the nature and destiny of peri-urban agricultural areas. Unstable places, rapidly changing, where the environmental systems that are slowly organized and trained in relation to the economy and agricultural culture are falling apart; these not builded intervals are invested not only by processes of real estate development that tend to turn them into new suburbs, but also by new activities, new social practices and unexpected questions that challenge the classical categories of urban analysis (among others, urban-rural landscape-the city, the center- outskirts). New forms of urban agriculture suggest to reformulate the relationship between cities (figure) and rural (background), assigning it the value of natural infrastructure, and therefore a public good, and resource. All this is a correspondence in a widespread demand for new natural, which is reflected in the changes taking place in terms of behavior and consumption in the sphere of living and leisure.