4x1: 4 km2 over 1 century

“4x1” is a semester-long exercise developed by students at the University of Ferrara. They were asked to select and frame an area of 4 square kilometres from anywhere in Italy. Three plans were required, representing the landscape context today, its ongoing transformative forces and its appearance in a century from now. The main request was to consider documented forecasts on climate change effects, as well as concurrent social trends (tourism, depopulation, etc.) or actual plans for urban and infrastructure development. In contrast, they have been free to speculate about future configurations according to different attitudes (policies) towards the forces at play: ranging from strong anthropic responses to "do nothing" answers. One purpose of the assignment was to challenge students' tendency at “overmining” design or analysis tasks: that is to take into account too general or generic topics, overestimating them, in the belief they can be transferred linearly from one scale to another. Throughout the research, they had to, and learnt to, continuously change the scale of their investigation, even in order to decide how to frame the chosen context. The resulting illustrations are a distilled outcome of a wider survey - on data and processes - which for the most part almost disappears during the journey. In the long run, like an “hyperobject”, the landscape we try to depict is always something that “withdraws” from our knowledge, perception or any attempt at fully describing it. But this is its fascination and why we keep probing it.