Giardini di asfalto. Pratiche e poetiche di paesaggi urbani

The recent history of asphalt translates the epic of the city of the twentieth century, until today. Indissolubly linked to the new spaces of the modern city, where it best expressed its characteristics (cheap, continuous, compact and durable) asphalt has become the essence of the modern urban landscape and emblem of its values and ambiguities. As a counterpoint, for those same features that led to its pervasive spread, it has gradually embodied the evils of the city and its removal appeared as a decisive action for the redemption of the city of the new millennium. Asphalt has quickly become one of the main waste of contemporary urbanism. Eventually, depaving has come to be an increasingly widespread practice that consists in removing the asphalt wherever possible, to leave space for fertile and permeable soils, especially through interventions of active citizenship. If referred to how to manage the waste of urbanisation, amongst many merits, this practice presents some limits. On one side, they are linked to the production of materials to be processed and / or landfi lled; on a symbolic side, the systematic removal of asphalt nourishes the stigma, not without ideological anti-urban connotations. Some recent landscape architecture experiences showcase the potential of existing asphalt as a resource for the design of contemporary public space. Beyond depaving, rather than removing the material, they reuse it on site and involve demolition into implementation in a creative way. In this text we visit three European gardens variously bound to urban infrastructures. Even though very diff erent in scale and program they are wed by the same inventive attitude: they put asphalt into new biological and social life cycles, triggering new places, languages, values and meanings.