Sustainable Design for Resilient Landscapes. ‘Productive Gardens’ as New Centers for Self-Made Architecture and Product Design

Moving towards sustainability is an ethic challenge for product, architecture and landscape design. Nevertheless, despite the increased popularity of the word, the possibility that ‘sustainable design’ has been or will be truly reached in the near future continues to be questioned. In the light of definition of tools to achieve this purpose questions that arise are: what does really ‘sustainability’ mean? Is sustainability a ‘cultural’ data? In order to create a truly ‘sustainability’ in Mediterranean non-core areas, such as villages of the Southern Italy, shall we exclusively rely on technological development, or shall we design architectures, landscape structures as well as industrial products related to ‘local’ material cultures? In other words, is there a specific approach we should have to establish a sustainable development and a close integration between urban and productive spaces, cultural identity and ‘creative industries’ development? In a region where the relationship between architecture, neighborhoods and cities has always been grounded on local materials and resources, and mediated by the presence of ‘green areas’ and ‘productive gardens’ (gardens arranged inside the building plots, gardens at the core of neighborhoods, or agricultural fabrics planned within the urban development logics), this paper aims to explore the possibility for a synergic development between ‘productive landscape’, ‘selfmade architecture’, and ‘sustainable manufacture systems for product design’. Within this approach ‘productive gardens’ could be turned into true urban centers for leisure and working activities, places for ‘sustainable supply chains’ for innovative product design, based on traditional ‘material culture’, and hub for new industrial bio-based productions; inside them building practice could be turned into self-made sustainable architecture, which allows to trigger co-design processes involving communities in building their productive places: in ‘doing it themselves’ communities become the real actors of landscape resilience. This paper aims to demonstrate the possibility of exploring a self-sustainable urban model based on a close relationship between ‘productive gardens’, self-made architecture and manufacture places where green infrastructures could represent new hubs for a resilient urban development related to local materials and forms and appropriate to regional characteristics. This model aims to be consistent both with territorial organism and architectures, as well as with the artifacts trying to define a new scenario for the material culture.