DISS / Delta international sustainable strategies. An educational and research project for the Emilia-Romagna territory of the Po delta

The contribution explores the peculiarities of the Emilia-Romagna territory of the Po Delta, tracing the main issues afflicting this fragile coastal system today, and outlining the necessary future challenges to take up in order to rethink its land/water structural balance, adapting to climate change and guiding territorial transformations towards more resilient configurations. The effects of climate change, together with contemporary socio-economic dynamics, are creating new pressures on the territory and its population, exposing the latter to new conditions of risk and undermining an already delicate equilibrium, forcing the investigation of new resilient design strategies and solutions, at different scales, to achieve greater sustainability. Moreover, these invented and artificial landscapes, mainly based on a constant control over the water regime, are also subject to an idea of heritage and cultural landscape as a static system that must be brought back to a previous “natural” state, freezing in time its features and characteristics to a specific evolutionary phase. This attitude is triggering expensive and counterproductive processes – both at the governance and operational levels – that are not proving capable of consciously driving the necessary change. Today more than ever, the coasts and deltaic territories represent an extraordinary field of testing and experimentation for design research and, with this aim, the CITER Research Lab (Architecture Department of the University of Ferrara) has been working on the Emilia-Romagna territory of the Po delta, integrating scientific research projects with educational paths involving university students, training events for professionals and public technicians, and experiences of participatory design involving local communities, some of which are briefly illustrated in this paper.