Toward the wild city

Wild is anything that arises or develops spontaneously, that escapes cultivation and domestication. Whether it is an impenetrable forest or a desert, it is uncontrollable, untamed and harsh: it is nature at its most exaggerated. At least, that's how we imagine it. The wilderness itself would not exist: it is our projection, a cultural construction. That is why it changes, following the geographies and chronologies of change of the contexts to which it refers. It is not a universal category; it evades the evidence of the obvious. It is a point of view, a way of seeing and reading the world as 'other' to us, and for this reason wilderness is interchangeable. Wilderness is an idea enlivened by the reinforcement of its opposite: there is no wilderness without civilisation, and vice versa. The oscillation of wilderness between repulsion and fascination, between stigma and elegy, is mirrored by the same bascule of cities. A series of clues - which I will mention in this text with the brevity that the occasion demands, taken from the cultural scenario in which contemporary landscape architecture participates - seem to operate in the gears of this oscillation, until they are sabotaged and blown up. They seem to lay the foundations for a habitat in which urbanity and wilderness finally mix until they become blurred and indistinguishable. It is the same idea of otherness between the two concepts that has been so stable in the past, although variously diminished, that creaks under the blows of thoughts and actions that tend to replace it with immature or advanced forms of co-presence. The wild is not only to be found in uncontrolled nature, but 'also' lives in the city, which, on the contrary, was designed from the outset as a defensive bulwark against its assaults. The encounter between the two worlds is not limited to the juxtaposition of pieces of city and nature, or the grafting of one into the other, but is constructed through the practice of hybridisation, generated by the intentional triggering of the project or arising from the self-determination of the existing. It's the 'wild city'.