15. Urban Productive Landscapes: Designing Nature for Re-acting Neo-liberal City

In the world of urbanism, architecture and landscape, new paradigms are currently changing the way people think about or interact with economic crisis, quality of life and self-made practices. In a scenario where the scale and pace of market-driven urbanization and ephemeral landscapes of pop-up settlements are challenging the notion of permanence as a basic planning principle, the regeneration of the city in the twenty-first century aims to the definition of multi-level approaches associated with emergent socio-spatial challenges. Many of the most promising ideas in this field are that of the reformulation, reclamation and recycle of variable patterns of open spaces as real generators of urban life. This paper presents a theoretical framework, understanding how urban regeneration processes, through the ‘bottom-up’ redevelopment of residual spaces, can represent an attempt to reduce degradation of peri-urban fragile environments and to find environmentally compatible ways of increasing the definition of urban productive landscapes.