Abitare lungo un fiume. Geografie e sistemi insediativi | Living along a river. Geographies and settlements systems: redrawing the banks

Water cities serve as an extraordinary laboratory for design research. The presence of a river within a city represents a unique opportunity: a significant context for experimenting with environmental and urban regeneration practices. This volume compiles the results of various design experiments that explore the relationship between settlement systems and river environments: the project for the revitalization of the aquatic landscape in Belgrade; the redevelopment project of the village of Hongkeng in the Fujian region of China; and the repurposing project of the Entrepeñas-Sacedón dam in the Castilla-La Mancha region of Spain. The investigation focuses on the architecture/landscape system, characterized by a stringent and specific relationship between settlement structures, territorial infrastructures, and land-use forms. Each of the three projects addresses, in turn, the key theme of establishing interdependent relationships, at various scales, between river and city, in order to reconstruct new, meaningful connections between Nature and Architecture. These projects offer new interpretations of that indeterminate, dynamic, and mutable in-between space that separates two typically autonomous and self-referential orders: the natural and the built environment. The foundational premise of the presented research considers the river itself as an architectural element capable of defining territorial and urban forms. The search for new grammatical forms for contemporary cities, based on a renewed relationship with Nature, aims to redefine and express a new urbanity that recognizes the empty space as a resource, in which the values of rural and urban life will increasingly converge.