This project aims to rethink the concept of territory from a material resource and controlled space available for exploitation to a relational and dynamic element typical of a complex system, trying to overcome the traditional dichotomies between centre-periphery, city-countryside, urban-rural. The proposal focuses on the area of Rho-Pero-Arese, in the North-West of Milan, which shows an interesting mixture of macro-regional infrastructural connections, a natural bio-reserve and several cultural emergencies that are currently abandoned. The territory is typologically discontinuous, spatially fractioned and dissected and it is preserved according to an obsolescent ecological fashion. The remarkable presence of local roads and highways is not clearly considered and embedded in the local territorial ecology and becomes a social-spatial barrier.

Nowadays ring roads, service stations, junctions, underpasses connote increasingly relevant portions of the landscape without being able to define localities, to relate specifically to the sites in which they are engrafted. They often remain quoted as marginal conditions, forgotten and marked as parasitical diseases. The project bears this infrastructural peculiarity as its necessary precondition. By interrelating activities and means of mobility, blending the notion of public and private and enhancing local systems of eco-production, it creates a newly assembled “cyborg”. Hence envisioning a space of mediation, the intervention recovers the otherwise dismembered social tissue.

The new infrastructural piece, with a punctual intervention of reconnection and renovation of the existing facilities, redesigns and arouses a sense of belonging to the physical place one lives in. It spurs the inhabitants, mostly composed by (global) commuters, to repossess the notion of locality, to re-determine creatively their own living modes and spaces. Combining and reconnecting existing natural features (such as the existing canals, the eco-parks, and the agricultural plots), we aim at enriching the potential biodiversity of the area and implanting different economies into a self-regenerating green resource. The types of intervention on the flora and the hydrological system span from the restoration of the living conditions of the riparian vegetation, the establishment of a planitial reforestation, the grafting of green spaces, diaphragms and roofs within the existing urban fabric, the redesign of the water system dynamic expansion and finally the inclusion of phyto-depuration ponds and wetlands. We redesign the urban mobility with the purpose of reducing to the minimum the use of fuel vehicles, creating frequent interchange nodes with eco-sustainable means of transportation (electric cars, bike sharing…).

The amorphous aspect of the masterplan marks a voluntary retreat from a defined aesthetics. The project is an operative framework, a fictional proposal that grounds purposely its essence on the process, welcoming an initial indefinite vague composition. The reconstituted spatial-social tissue, defined by the urban texture, the infrastructure and the space of production, could become a connective and collective ecological incubator that catalyses the local touristic potential and future economy.