City. Infrastructure. Landscape New urban spaces along the Tiburtina Tramway, Rome.

The city that develops along the Via Tiburtina -inside and beyond the municipal boundaries of Rome, up to the slopes of Tivoli - is a paradigmatic case of the contemporary metropolis: it appears without form or boundaries. The city transforms into territory relocating its fragments where once was the Roman Agro along the Aniene river.

Among his "pieces" we can find diverse spatial organizations and forms of life: the giant public housing complexes and the smaller speculative or informal residential settlements.

The core of these new urbanizations is Via Tiburtina, whose fronts, suitable for motorists, are marked by the neon lights of the “playful” city and the fumes of the productive sheds.

One time the productive city was linked to geomorphological characters of the site, which allowed a flourishing mining activity and paper production. In recent years, many technology and logistic activities have been added, thanks to the GRA, the Autostrada del Sole and the A24 highways.

The walls of red tuff and white travertine alternate with the grey metal of the large international couriers’ sheds, with the old pharmaceutical factories’ chimneys, with the car towers of the main automotive headquarters, the last ones almost to celebrate a territorial universe where there is no alternative to the car.

Only on the background to this multitude of fragments remains the Aniene’s landscape, that limits in the south side the valleys and the plains descending from an ancient vulcan- the Vulcano Laziale- and in the north side the gently sloping hills of the Inviolata Regional Park.

In this context, the project aims to reorganize the fragments around the Acqua Marcia aqueduct, that runs straight parallel to via Tiburtina, whose strip is the challenge for a new tramway, considering it as an intermediate infrastructure between via Tiburtina and the Aniene river. This new tramway will be certainly a mobility infrastructure as well a magnet able to make a sequence of new urban open spaces, which can vertebrate this part of new city.