Terrain vague +25. Un’indagine sui territori selvatici secondo il metodo di Ignasi de Solà-Morales.

The subject of the research is "wild territories", a term that may appear as an oxymoron, composed of two words representing opposing concepts. The first, "territory", refers to a defined portion of land of generic dimensions. This can be considered anthropized when visibly altered by human activity and urbanized when it includes constructions and infrastructure. In both cases, the territory is always subject to human control. Franco Farinelli has specified that the concept of territory does not only derive from "land" but also incorporates the terror of political power. In short, "territory" can assume meanings linked to power and control. The term "wild" can be associated with a plant that grows spontaneously and thrives without cultivation, or an animal that lives freely. In a broader sense, "wild" represents everything that develops spontaneously, in an undisciplined manner, and outside of any control. The term "wild" is often used to describe rough, rustic, and uncouth people, while the term "civilized" is used to describe correct, courteous, and well-educated behaviors. Civilized is someone who lives in a territory, presumably urbanized, and is therefore endowed with good manners. The two categories, wild and civilized, are rejected by contemporary anthropological sciences, which interpret them as a legacy of colonialist and discriminatory thought. This classification, often adopted in Western cultures, seeks to identify an "us" (the civilized) and an "other" (the wild). It would seem, therefore, that the two terms only make sense when opposed: the wild is «an idea that revives with the strengthening of its opposite: there is no wild without civilization and vice versa». In summary, on one hand, there is the territory representing civilization, power, and control, and on the other hand, there is the wild, its exact opposite. However, some argue, like Annalisa Metta, that the wild itself does not exist. It «is our projection and therefore changes, following the geographies and chronologies of the contexts of reference». It is not, therefore, a universal concept but one of the many ways of observing the world. Therefore, the adjective "wild" can be used to describe those territories subject to the uncontrolled phenomenon of "urban rewilding". Rewilding is the process of returning to a wild state for certain animals or plants that were in a domestic or cultivated condition. In other terms, it can be considered as the reverse process of domestication. This phenomenon can also concern urban space, especially if it involves portions of residual or abandoned land. Considering then that urban rewilding is a phenomenon that affects numerous realities, an in-depth study aimed at the codification of wild territories is urgently needed. Wild territories are urban spaces in balance between control and non-control, places that Robert Venturi might define as complex and contradictory. It is no longer about wild "or" urban spaces, but rather about wild "and" urban spaces. Wild territories include, for example, all those previously exploited urban spaces that are in a state of abandonment or semi-abandonment and present wild characteristics out of control. The definition also includes all residual spaces, which are nothing but the result of an act of architectural design or urban planning. Abandoned and residual spaces represent, in short, the sentinels of the phenomenon of urban rewilding. Symptoms of nature reclaiming urban space mainly manifest in these places. In this thesis, the investigation of wild territories was conducted both in terms of criticism of the city and architecture and in terms of urban design and planning. The investigation took place through bibliographic research and the critical observation of some case studies, following a particular method experimented by the Catalan architect Ignasi de Solà-Morales i Rubiò. In 1996, Ignasi de Solà-Morales i Rubiò, as the curator of the XIX Congress of the International Union of Architects (UIA) held in Barcelona, chose to address the theme of the post-industrial city. The congress exhibition, entitled Present and Futures: Architecture in Cities, sought to open a reflection on the role of the city and architecture of the time through the study of five themes usually unrelated to the discipline: "Mutations," "Flows," "Habitations," "Containers," and "Terrain Vague." For Solà-Morales, the exhibition represented an opportunity to revisit some topics he had already addressed in the past, such as that of the terrain vague. These two words were the title of a conference he held in Montreal (Canada) in 1994, as part of the conference Anyplace, conceived and organized by himself, Peter Eisenman, and Arata Isozaki. His intervention was so successful that it was published both in French and Catalan in the journal Quaderns d’arquitectura i urbanisme in 1996, and in English in the books that collected the proceedings of Anyplace (1995) and Present and Futures: Architecture in Cities (1997). From then on, the theme of the terrain vague became a commonly used topic among architects, landscapers, and urban planners. But what does terrain vague mean? The term consists of two French words. The first, a variant of the French term “terrein”, refers to more or less vast and undefined territories, generic portions of land with their own development potential but to which one is temporarily estranged. The second word, “vague”, has a greater degree of complexity, having a German derivation and two Latin derivations. The German word woge, from which it derives, refers to the swelling of the sea, alluding to movement, oscillation, instability, and fluctuation. Instead, the Latin language provides two derivations, which are vacuus and vagus. The first is translated as "empty" and "unoccupied," and therefore also as "free," "available," and "uncommitted." The second Latin derivation, vagus, can be translated as "indeterminate," "imprecise," and "uncertain." Although they contain the negative prefix, they do not necessarily provide a negative connotation to the terrain vague. Ignasi de Solà-Morales described these places as: «Here, only a few residual values survive, despite the total disaffection from the activity of the city. These strange places exist outside the city’s effective circuits and productive structures. From the economic point of view, industrial areas, railway stations, ports, unsafe residential neighborhoods, and contaminated places are where the city is no longer. Unincorporated margins, interior islands void of activity, oversights, these areas are simply un-inhabited, un-safe, un-productive. In short, they are foreign to the urban system, mentally exterior in the physical interior of the city, its negative image, as much a critique as a possible alternative». Solà-Morales, by introducing this theme into the architectural debate, aimed to acknowledge the right of existence of places that, until that moment, were considered useless and unproductive. In the terrain vague, there reside values worthy of consideration. According to him, a good portion of the metropolitan population is highly interested in free and indefinite space as an alternative to the banality of the productive city. The terrain vague, presenting itself as a complex and stratified palimpsest, is capable of conveying historical values much more interesting than the monuments occupying cities. Furthermore, uncertainty, freedom, and emptiness can generate very high expectations for the future. A vacant lot, an abandoned industrial plant, or the residual space created by an infrastructure can potentially become anything. For these reasons, Ignasi de Solà-Morales proposed the maintenance of the terrain vague, defending it from those who would have wanted to convert it into a productive space. He discouraged the use of typical architectural design tools because, as Rem Koolhaas said, «where there is nothing, everything is possible. Where there is architecture, nothing (else) is possible». More than twenty-five years after the 1996 Barcelona congress, some of the characteristics of the terrain vague, such as its being residual or abandoned space, have returned to the center of the debate on architecture and the city. Authors such as Patrick Barron, Alan Berger, Alessandro Gabbianelli, Gilles Clément, Christophe Girot, Adriaan Geuze, Sabine Hofmeister, Ingo Kowarik, Manuela Mariani, Annalisa Metta, Pierluigi Nicolin, Franco Purini, Bernardo Secchi, and Paola Viganò have addressed the topic of residual and abandoned urban space in various ways in the first decades of the new century. In general, all agree that new terms and categories are needed to address the issue. Among those who have most influenced the way of understanding such spaces is Gilles Clément, who, with the publication of the Manifesto of the Third Landscape (2004), suggested a valorization of biodiversity present in residual spaces. Clément undoubtedly deserves credit for legitimizing the concept of spontaneous and wild nature as a qualitative element of urban space. From the early 2000s, rejected and forgotten spaces have assumed, as refuges of biodiversity, an important role in the contemporary metropolitan system. Another useful term to define the phenomenon of spontaneous conversion of urban space into wild is "fourth nature", as reported by the German ecologist Ingo Kowarik. The concept of fourth nature is in continuity with the definitions of the first three "natures" described by John Dixon Hunt in Greater Perfections: The Practice of Garden Theory (2000), which in turn refers to ancient texts. The "first nature" was mentioned by Marcus Tullius Cicero, who, in De Natura Deorum (45 B.C.), described it as a mysterious, frightening forest inhabited by gods. Today, first nature is often defined by the English term "wilderness." The topic of wilderness has been addressed by many authors. For example, environmental historian William Cronon attempted to debunk, in the essay The Trouble with Wilderness, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature (1995), the romantic belief that wilderness was a pure and untouched place as it appeared in the photographs of Ansel Adams and Edward Weston. Wilderness, according to him, is not at all a pristine and unspoiled nature but an idealized product of human civilization. The "second nature" mainly consists of everything related to agricultural activity, i.e., farms, cultivated fields, irrigation canals, pastures, and the like. The creation of the second nature aims solely to exploit the land to meet human survival needs. In this case, any aesthetic value is absolutely irrelevant. Aesthetics, instead, are fundamental for the "third nature", which emerged later in history when perimeter walls were built, and species and ornamental artifacts were inserted into the second nature. This concept was expressed in the sixteenth century by some Italian humanists such as Bartolomeo Taegio and Jacobo Bonafadio. This form of nature consists of landscapes designed and maintained for human pleasure, beauty, and recreational activities. This classification of the first three natures remained more or less the same until the twentieth century when urban conditions changed dramatically, generating disorder and confusion in the field of landscape architecture and urban design studies. In an era that some called "post-industrial," a whole series of hybrid places arose, consisting of traces of human past as well as traces of wild nature. In these particular spaces, partly approaching the definition of terrain vague by Solà-Morales, some species of plants and animals have shown themselves to be particularly suitable for recolonizing urban territory. Returning then to Ingo Kowarik, these spaces, in his view, can be defined as "fourth nature," namely those marginal urban places where various species of animals and plants live, especially pioneer and invasive ones. The term is in perfect continuity with the three natures described by John Dixon Hunt and refers to the hybrid nature that emerges on residual and abandoned sites. The fourth nature, although it cannot boast the same levels of biodiversity as the first nature, is the one that comes closest to it. The second and third, being a human product, contain only species wanted and introduced by humans, while the fourth nature is hybrid. Moreover, the longer time passes, the more the fourth nature will resemble the idea of wilderness: in just three decades, an urban space can transform into a tall tree forest, while in five centuries, it can take on the appearance of a forest. In 2013, Ingo Kowarik partially revised his historicist and anthropocentric position regarding the four natures, suggesting instead that the "natural condition" can be defined in part through a behavioral meaning, considering natural anything that self-determines. Accepting that naturalness can be defined by referring to a high level of self-organization of ecosystems implies recognizing its being indeterminate and changeable. Based on this conception of "naturalness" proposed by Ingo Kowarik, the definition of wild territories emerges, which are not only places at a given historical moment, like terrains vagues or fourth natures, but are above all behavioral manifestations. The research objectives are essentially threefold: 1. To circumscribe and identify wild territories; 2. To identify tools for exploring wild territories; 3. To demonstrate the predisposition of wild territories to be sites for design projects. Regarding the first of these objectives, efforts have been made to circumscribe and contextualize the reality surrounding wild territories. Attempts have been made to answer questions such as: where and how do they arise? Why does the phenomenon affect certain urban realities and not others? What terms and definitions are needed to interpret them? What values do they convey? Circumscribing and identifying wild territories thus means defining a field of inquiry. The second objective involves identifying suitable tools for conducting surveys of the areas under study. What are the best means of observing the phenomenon? Does the architectural and urban discipline already possess the appropriate tools to engage with these realities? These are just some of the questions that have been addressed. Finally, it is important to demonstrate how wild territories can be a subject of reflection for urban space design. This means that it is not exclusively an issue for academic and critical contexts. The aim is to show that wild territories are areas for experimenting with new forms of urban space occupation. Within this thesis, the term "occupation" will be used to refer to design forms capable of preserving the intrinsic values of wild territories. In order not to compromise biodiversity and the mutation processes that characterize these places, it is necessary to abandon the idea of completely controlling space, adopting design tools different from those typical of conventional architecture and urban planning. This approach has been widely experimented with, at least in recent decades, by landscape architecture, which by its nature operates with methodologies aimed at creating open, complex, layered, and deliberately incomplete works. In this sense, it can be said that the legacy left by Ignasi de Solà-Morales has been mainly embraced by landscape architects. On the other hand, within the field of urban and architectural composition, these design themes have generally not been received, except for rare exceptions. Firmly believing that wild territories are a source of inspiration even for architects primarily oriented towards construction, some examples of occupation have been proposed in the hope that they can open up new avenues for rethinking these places. To achieve the objectives, a comparative method has been chosen. The comparison is between what was written about the terrain vague in the 1990s by Ignasi de Solà-Morales and recent literature on wild territories. The terrain vague interpreted by Solà-Morales and the wild territories addressed in this thesis undoubtedly share common characteristics. Both, for example, concern residual and abandoned urban space. However, it must be stated with extreme clarity that the two phenomena represent two completely different epochs: in more than twenty-five years, the processes regulating city transformations have changed. The same applies to the tools used by Solà-Morales to investigate the phenomenon. Therefore, the two terms must be treated as distinct objects. What justifies the comparison is the chosen method introduced by Ignasi de Solà-Morales. The analysis of his writings on the terrain vague is fundamental to defining a methodology still valid for dealing with residual and abandoned urban space. To achieve the objectives of circumscribing wild territories and identifying exploration tools, a comparison was therefore made between the two phenomena (terrain vague and wild territories), following the methodological framework of the Catalan architect.