Reinterpreting three species of public spaces in Florence

The Laboratory in Gardens, Park and Open Spaces Design aims to provide skills and tools to develop a landscape designing process at the site scale with particular reference to urban gardens and public open spaces.

The learning process is based on an interdisciplinary approach combining theories and knowledges of three teaching: Landscape Architecture 1; Applied Botany; Construction Design.

Topics include garden and landscape design theory; site inventory and analysis; planting design; application of the design process to projects at the site scale.

An objective of the project application is to develop in the students a design sensitive approach based on the assumption that the process of reading, knowing and representing a place/site needs an imaginative effort as much as the creative process of his transformation.

In the 2019/20 edition the application have been focused on a system of three public spaces in the historical city centre of Florence: the Ciompi Square (recently refurbished with a controversy project ) and two contiguous urban walled gardens which need a requalification.

The goal of the laboratory was to develop alternative scenarios introducing solutions and strategies to climate change adaption and mitigation into an urban historical landscape, recognized as Unesco World Heritage.

The students, working in different groups, have set themselves the main objective of increasing the permeability of urban soils and to raise natural capital, looking for suitable design solutions to combine together active conservation of an historical urban landscape, memory of  sites, social needs (inhabitants and tourist), environmental sustainability.