Residual spaces and adaptive urban landscapes. New regenerative scenarios in the Turin area

Nowadays, metropolitan urban contexts are called to adapt “to a new urban issue” (Secchi, 2011), a complexity of external factors – growth of population, climate, environmental, economic and social changes - that determine a state of vulnerability and fragility of their living conditions. In this framework it is necessary to investigate transformation strategies towards more sustainable cities, which can find in its widespread and multi-scalar open space a device for resilient and regenerative solutions. The research context is the city of Turin, where the recognition of the regenerative value of urban "wastes" (Lynch, 1990), result of post-industrial planning and dismission processes, is today crucial to reassemble the fragmented morphologic structure towards an adaptive change. Understanding how this legacy could be re-interpreted, as a heritage of the future, is one of the challenges that this research aims to investigate, trying to delineate a methodological framework for a new resilient urban metabolism. The use of “Mapping” as an interpretative and representative instrument of those emerging urban dynamics, wants to reveal the vulnerabilities and opportunities, and to investigate a taxonomy of overlays to reveal possible geographies, suggesting alternative strategies. The aim is the production of a dynamic cartographic framework, functional to new design visions necessary to manage the uncertainty of future impacts on the city and society (Russo, 2014). Starting from the action of Mapping, the design of a dynamic and experimental open space of the city, where technological and environmental solution coexist, aims to give a systemic answer, to that “inverse city” (Viganò, 1999). The definition of adaptive design scenarios, from an ecological network, able to infiltrate the consolidated city, to a new urban narrative capable to rethink the importance of designing residual spaces, is the operative approach to re-consider Nature element for the ability to preserve that precious urban porosity that outlines the urban well-being and therefore of human life (Gehl, 2013).