Landscape and Modern City: Requalification of the Perugia Railway Station District

Abstract

The interpretation of landscape, in the figurative process, comes into crisis in places characterized by an absence of definition, of boundary, of identity – the conditions of our suburban districts. “Urban landscape”, “rural landscape”, or “natural landscape” exist: no one thinks about a “suburban landscape” because these spaces are often “Characters in Search of an Author”, a condensed center of disjointedness, where anthropization has too many times decreased natural and environmental values. Rethinking and redrawing landscape means reinterpreting places and confronting the urban question as landscape topics aim to generate links of reconstruction between community and city. The applicative results of research in this topic starts from the national call for suburban boundaries requalification, for which Perugia Municipality has sealed an agreement with the group of researchers representing the University of Perugia to study the image of the next district, Fontivegge, around the railway station. The project developed aims to stop the deterioration of this central part of Perugia, intervening in a saturated urban landscape through new signs targeting the citizen in the recovering of public spaces and for the construction of a smart city. The proposal acts in a multitasking strategy of redrawing parks, urban mobility, and spatial reconnection, and funds were awarded (16 million euros) for work that is coming soon. According to the smart city principle of “doing more with less,” the proposal is developed with zero-volume architecture rethinking the visual. The proposal results in application of the Lynchian theory of the image of the city in the centrality of perception, in a research approach based on a human–environmental relationship. Building with nature, this concept valorizes the main ecological basins of the area with a process of improvement in user services, space quality, and ecological and environmental value. The draft increases the existing vegetation, especially with the use of edible plants, and it involves the construction of urban gardens for the local community to generate the re-appropriation of spaces by the community itself valorizing the perceptual senses. The idea is to create a public space that can promote the urban vitality of the entire district, by becoming the attractor for the community, and it becomes a district safety supervision. The aim of the project is to retrieve the urban space, in the new relationship between man and the environment, redrawing the urban landscape for a new image of the city. However, the proposal launches more questions than answers, asking how is it possible to reappropriate the hold of public space. The hope is that it can generate a dispute about solutions, involving citizens to co-design their place and revaluing their urban landscape according to a common good value. The approach in representation topic is central to connecting the analysis developed through an urban survey with the project, according to the study of architecture in a contemporary approach for the sustainability of the spaces.