Digital Manufacturing For Strategic Green Infrastructures

Urban garden practise is a self-production and social activity that acts at different scales, starting from a single family to the involvement of entire communities. It ensures food security and fights urban degradation, even in developing countries, where it is possible to find poverty and critical environmental situations. Nowadays, the European Commission recognises urban gardens as green infrastructures that represent a strategic design tool - already inserted in several international urban policy programmes - to tackle both the soil reduction, due to the increasing of urban density, and the progressive consumption of natural resources aimed at food supply. However, the lack of space needs technological solutions that allow them to integrate urban gardens with horizontal and vertical spaces of buildings and the urban fabric. Having clarified these concepts, through the definition of some case studies, this contribution wants to outline possible guidelines to develop strategic sustainable projects for green infrastructures within the cities, integrating urban agriculture with additive and subtractive digital manufacturing tools. Moreover, because of the current digitisation, it is possible to extend the concept of community and propose the elaboration of open source projects ¬¬– such as greenhouses, architectural components or design objects – to be uploaded in sharing platforms. Following this procedure, everyone could actively collaborate to modify/optimise the available digital data, in order to define constantly updated projects, which are set and customisable to different economic, environmental and social conditions. Through this democratization of digital production tools, indeed, it is possible to offer adaptable design solutions, which deviate from mass production standards with a view to achieving resilient products, which can be efficiently dropped in different contexts, optimising, at the same time, the use of resources and production costs.