Public Space and the Saturated City. Landscape Architecture for the Illegal Housing Districts along the Grande Raccordo Anulare in Rome

Rome is the largest Italian city: extended over 1290 sq km, it seems to never end. In the contemporary collective imaginary, only GRA – Grande Raccordo Anulare (The Big Ring Road) – probably can give back the idea of Rome as a whole. It appeared in the early 1940s as an exurban road, very far beyond the city's outer fringes: purpose was not an everyday local bypass, but banning traffic along the national north-south route from the core of Rome. Nevertheless, in few decades, the ring became an implicit settlement law, attracting such incoherent urban pieces to realize a peculiar as well unwilling collage city. Many illegal residential districts, in time normalized by law, are among the tiles. Beyond deserved blame, today they offer the opportunity for a reversing view about density in contemporary cities. In the current vulgate, density is defined by the amount of buildings built per unit area: it is the floor area ratio (FAR) to the size of land where to build. But what about open spaces? What happens if we consider density regarding to the amount of open spaces for public use? According with the leading question of this conference – Does the high density city primarily accommodate or exclude urban landscapes? – I would like to reverse our gaze: instead of defining density by quantity of buildings, I propose to look at it through availability of public open spaces. In other words, I propose to dwell upon saturated city – produced by the private saturation of land and exclusion of plots for public use – as a peculiar condition of the dense city, regardless to buildings volume: I mean saturation as density of land eroded from collective realm. GRA's illegal housing districts are typically made of small, low and detached buildings, standing on medium size fenced plots that privatize the whole space, denying any opportunities for shared or common open places. You will not find there nothing similar to squares, gardens, parks, neither just sidewalks and any kind of mediation between home life and driveways. Born without any planning, illegal districts often extend over harsh portions of the articulated topography of Rome: as a result, wrecks of wild nature over the more sharply sloped areas, flooding valleys or abandoned agricultural plots appear among the saturated housing pattern. Can landscape architecture still play a proactive role in these areas? I advance the hypothesis that the tiny portions of still free layer – in Enric Batlle's words –, irrelevant and weak if considered autonomously, can instead become a network of interlinked spaces that can finally find place in the saturated city, eroding its seemingly impenetrable seamless. The structural value of geography is the groundwork for designing sequences of small public spaces, to which entrust an osmotic passage between buildings, urban spaces and fringes of wildlife. This network can rebuild and strengthen environmental continuity; where necessary, it can reduce risks of flooding; finally, it can bring there a renewed idea of urbanity, based on social, environmental and geographical foundations. The positive effects of urban green spaces are well-known, ranging from the promotion of health, support of biodiversity to climate regulation. However, the practical implementation of urban landscapes is less discussed. How can we make these spaces functional, economically feasible and inclusive, especially as cities become more diverse? The publication explores strategies to reconcile the various demands, such as food production, resilience and nature conservation. Indeed, urban landscapes have to be restorative, ecological and aesthetically pleasing at the same time. This is a particular challenge in high-density cities like Singapore, Seoul or New York where space is a scarce commodity. The continuing growth of the worldwide urban population imbues the topic with a special urgency.