Sant'Agata river urban park

The relationship between the rivers - ‘fiumare’ - and the city of Reggio Calabria determines around the urban river parks landscape design the recognition of a central value of the waterways in the regeneration and redevelopment processes. River areas are often landscapes of degradation, abandonment, waste; rejection landscapes. They’re compromised landscapes by road infrastructure networks built beside, above, inside the waterways; landscapes of abandonment, that are not designed or excluded from urban planning.

The Fiumara Sant’Agata in Reggio Calabria. As a space for interaction, mobility and environmental sustainability, the 'linear' dimension of the project is redesigned as a complex landscape; a 'device' to experiment with strategic levels of intervention affecting infrastructure, slow mobility and services: on-board areas, cycle lanes, paths, gardens, vegetable gardens, agricultural and recreational areas. An environmental and collective quality of new spaces to live in. The system aims to enhance a limnological ecosystem, which concerns lake hydrology, through expanding basins designed as wetland gardens. A strategy that, by ensuring river management and the possibility of flooding of marginal areas in case of large water flow, restores the sustainable development of the river as an ecological and energy system. These are solutions that confer to the river the quality and the role of longitudinal and transverse sewing in a dual value: between the edges of its banks, and at the same time between the river and the context to which it belongs, maintaining the character of penetration and travel infrastructure in the reorganization of the urban building fabric.