Beyond Water Process

In our cities usually there are single-function infrastructures, imagining new forms and features for those infrastructures is our challenge.  

The industrial area in the south of Trento (IT) used to be a highly productive area but in the Nineties, it was partially converted into a sport district. The urban landscape is characterized by sport facilities, parking areas, industrial factories and concrete impermeable surfaces that limited the natural features and made impossible any social activity. Here is located an important infrastructure able to purify the city’s water. 

The project proposed by the local administration to build a new water purifier offers an opportunity to rethink and reuse the former plant into an urban ecological device for rainwater collection and distribution, for urban adaptation to climate change and lastly for reducing the impermeable surfaces. 

The project proposes to use the rain water to create an urban-ecological landscape where people will be able to find a place to go to enjoy nature, which will be the same place where excessive water will be collect, stored, purified and slowly released. 

This blue and green infrastructure is composed by a spinal column in which water flows; water generates spaces through many different devices, able to grow the natural variety and the social activities. It is a tentacular design, expandable to connect new areas and functions, able to adapt to the context. In this perspective the water management infrastructure is not a problem but an opportunity to create a resilient tool able to generate new ecological and social spaces for the future changes.