Watercourses and urban-rural linkages. From agriculture to urban landscape regeneration

Contemporary cities are characterized by a profound mixture between built-up fabrics and pieces of agricultural landscapes that permeate them. Urban countryside innervates the sparse urban tissues of the suburbs where, for hydro-geological reasons, it is difficult to settle. This defines apparently disordered urban and metropolitan landscapes, which are instead rich of potential components to be valorised and reconsidered within an ecological vision of the city. This is relevant in the case of the city of Bari, a southern Italian medium-sized city, set where the natural structure of a number of so called “lame”, i.e. orographic depressions that were once small streams of water, reaches the coastline. Today their valley bottom is only seemingly empty of water, which is instead still visible through the presence of the rich vegetation growing there, vegetable gardens and orchards, and which differs from the surrounding arid landscape of olive groves and vineyards. The carsick landscape of the lame is a changing and dynamic landscape, which suddenly become a wet landscape when it rains, that is more and more often as a result of climate changes. These complex ecosystems are overlooked by fragments of the sparse urban fabric of the suburbs, where buildings float in areas where the form of open spaces has been lost, which need to be regenerate. This paper deals with the role of landscape design in defining a consistent urban sustainability for the Mediterranean landscape. It aims at demonstrating the possibility of re-proposing high degree self-sustainable ‘urban systems’ functioning thanks to wise techniques of local resources control, and appropriate, in their architectural forms, to the local territorial characteristics. Spanning from analysis to design, it aims at presenting some landscape design proposals for the urban regeneration of these peripheral areas of the city of Bari, through the reconstruction of the continuity between countryside and city. Based on the topic of the formalization of the agricultural landscape, as a main reconnecting principle, projects are aimed at transforming urban interstices and boundaries into multifunctional public spaces, where the agricultural landscape is re-knitted to peripheral urban forms, and where the new vision for peri-urban areas is strongly linked to the identity of the surrounding territory.