MOVING INTO PERI-URBAN MOSAICS. Building resilient relationships along the margins: the Green System Plan of Ravenna for a new liveability

The ongoing process of urbanization and its expression in intensive land exploitation, fragmentation of natural areas and cycles gave shape to our cities. A renewed centrality of the soil guaranteeing essential functions and services for the local communities’ welfare is necessary, particularly in zones of friction and marginality such as urban voids and peri-urban fringes. Bearing in mind the definition of a mosaic where the settlement, the agricultural and the environmental systems interact and coexist together (Kipar, 1994), a formal and functional reconstruction of peri-urban fringes is crucial: they could give back a sense and the identity to the undefined spaces produced by a controversial planning tradition, due to their potential of conversion and transformation. The paper deals with a clarified reciprocity between built environment and open territory, outlining project actions measured to the current challenge – such as climate changes –, setting infrastructural intervention and new energy sources. Focusing on the case study of the Green System Plan of Ravenna (Italy), the attention is given to model planning policies towards design actions able to create physical and ecological connections between the city and the territory. Therefore, the peri-urban fringes become places of experimentation, guaranteeing the interaction between different functional layers and improving the urban resilience: the result is the coexistence of the anthropic development with the preservation and implementation of environmental ecosystems, in a systemic and programmatic vision, throughout landscape ecology design approach for a resilient and ecological city. Within this system, the infrastructures would have a renewed role in building miscellaneous geographies between urban and rural areas and on landscapes vulnerability: the defined resilient factors and spaces could be innervated along the main corridors, grafting onto the obsolete and dismissed urban spaces, in an osmotic process and a wider vision of urban metabolism recovering the elements of the city.