BORGO DIGITALE | SYRACUSE UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE IN FLORENCE

In its second season, the research of the Florence studio will leverage the territorial as well as the ideological space of the ‘bonifiche’ - a device used to promote infrastructures for land reclamation alongside ideologies of cultural exclusion. Critically engaging ideas of productivity, healthiness, human-non-human ecologies as well as natural-artificial constructs, the studio aims to articulate inclusive narratives of the built environment to think through “locally generated spaces representing the intersection of multiple places, histories and subjects.”
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Risanare terreni paludosi per renderli produttivi e adatti all'insediamento umano, prosciugare [to restore marshy land to make it productive and suitable for human settlement, to drain]
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Recuperare una zona degradata con interventi agrari ed edilizi, risanare [to reclaim a degraded area with agricultural and building interventions, to rehabilitate]
/bo·ni·fi·cà·re/
Looking into the definition of the verb ‘Bonificare’ - and its associated noun ‘Bonifica’ - immediately reveals the tight relationship existing between strategies of land management and the associated value systems required to support them. ‘Suitability’ and ‘productivity’ are just a few of the parameters underpinning these interventions that, while often productively deployed to recuperate sites glaringly contaminated by human activities, have dramatically reshaped the territory of the Italian peninsula, often marginalizing cultures considered ‘different’ or ‘unproductive’.

The Italian word “maremma” derives from latin marĭtĭma meaning “maritime districts”, or from the castilian word marisma meaning “swamp”, and it describes a specific coastal landscape typology, with a closed coastal strip marking off a low plain. On this plain inland water collects, also bringing solid constituents with it, forming a wetland or marshland: the region of Maremma on the coast of Tuscany and northern Lazio, is a typical example of this landscape.
/ la Maremma /
Sharing a common brief, the studio will offer three sections working closely with each other to critically understand the relationship between land-management practices and cultural spaces of encounter. Moving beyond stale dichotomies of urban and rural, culture and nature the studio aims to suggest contemporary strategies of coexistence on the territory. Varying in scale and programmatic focus, the three sections will share a common regional emphasis to construct a collective reading of a larger territory of the Italian countryside so dramatically influenced by practices of land-reclamation. The space of the Maremma will serve as the speculative site to imagine contemporary garden typologies, rurbanisation of spatial structures, as well as toxic landscapes of reuse.
