Crossing and connecting: the urban open space system

A dense built environment, at a human scale, is a city in which buildings are not isolated and enclosed within boundaries. In this kind of city open space can more easily creep in and create the necessary conditions both for functional and environmental improvement and for mending the built environment. Improvement that lies not only in the quality of the individual spatial elements but also in the fact that they can be connected in a network whose connections are functional for movement as well as to the creation of an articulated system of open spaces characterised by different levels of naturalness in which, green and grey areas alternate and integrate to meet technological, ecological-environmental and social requirements. Sharing the idea of resilience as a process to be built, there is a need to operate according to regenerative cycles able to activate transformation processes closely related to resilience through actions of adaptation of urban systems so that they increase their adaptive capacity in situations of anthropic and environmental criticality. Open spaces, therefore, play a key role within the city system as nodal elements in the activation of diversified urban regeneration processes. The urban open space system aims, among other things, to recompose spaces and activities through the creation of a connective fabric that acts as a “complete” but also “infiltrating” system with respect to the urban context, also acting as a concrete tool for the adaptive reuse of the existing heritage. The methodological and design openness towards a systemic approach to the quality of life is necessary if we aim to propose strategies that can be configured as real solutions for tackling current environmental and functional criticalities, also from the point of view of a circular logic within which not only the built environment but also open space can represent an interesting field of experimentation.