Liquid landscapes

The Po is at the center of one of the most infrastructured and inhabited metropolitan areas of Europe; together with the A4 motorway, it marks the landscape of the Po valley. The Po and the A4 can represent a complementary and integrated system for this great city that goes from Turin to Venice, from the Apennines to the Pre-Alps.

The A4 ribbon is punctuated by innumerable roadside restaurants that allow parking, pause, refreshment, rest; let’s imagine that similar stopping places are installed along the Po that allow access to a natural environment and to exchange our time with the well-being that the place and the practices that can be carried out can give us.

The processes of re-naturalization of some parts of abandoned or abandoned territory will have a parallel in specific places where we can re-naturalize our behaviors, our ways of being together and sharing space, where we can regain a relationship with nature and its incessant evolution. Let’s imagine that around the new piers, along the banks, in the areas of the abandoned quarries, at the end of the woods that suddenly open on the horizon delimited by the river, a collective mode of enjoyment of nature and exchange between people can be reborn, a form of commonality – temporary, discontinuous, fragmentary – that puts space back into play through the senses, without commercial mediations, without theme parks, without programs to carry out. In this sense, the proposed solution is configured primarily as a model of a man-environment relationship in which man rediscovers a sphere of behavioral and psycho-emotional freedom denied by modern life, and which in a completely natural way is accompanied by simple actions aimed at to the care for the place that welcomes him at that moment. The Po will be punctuated by a system of landings, water and land, which will host a population geared towards enhancing the experience of nature in a simple and unstructured way, that wants a place to stay without necessarily having a event or something is organized, a place to be alone or with others but according to a free choice, where commercial and entertainment services are minimized and represent an integration of the main offer concerning the re-naturalization of our behaviors, of the we perceive the limits of nature and the ecosystem, of participating in an environment that has its rules and that must be recognized and respected.

But what do you do in these places? Even nothing, if you want. But in any case you will find food, you can stop and sleep, you can bring your tent and camp, you can fish and make music, you can cultivate a vegetable garden, you can walk on tall grass, or in the mud on the embankment, you can bring your laptop and start working in WiFi under a poplar, you can bring something to cook using the facilities of the place, you can take a break during a bike ride or linger looking at the river, the small boats that dock, the children who play, the boys who bathe.