Architecture Master Thesis
Location: Monti Pisani, Pisa/Lucca (Italy)
Authors: Matilde Villa, Giulia Tosarello
Supervisors: Enrico Carlo Forestieri, Matteo Umberto Poli
2019
In the last decades, it has been more and more evident that our relationship with Nature has reached a critical point. Humans had increasingly used Nature for Human benefits. To avoid the collapse, we should negotiate with Nature a new contract, dealing with all its actors and their needs, change the ways we do things, without necessarily giving them up: a way of being part of Nature again, while maintaining our passions and needs.
We suggest taking into account the unexpressed potentials of a specific area and rewire a set of heterogeneous actors (humans, flora, fauna, etc.) and artifacts to sort out a completely new, cosmopolitical assemblage from existing elements.
How can this approach shape a new landscape?
We focus on the Monti Pisani area. Here, in just 20 km we can find a series of high potential, yet disconnected, points: two main protected areas containing a wide range of habitats (from the sea to the forests, through wetlands, grasslands, Mediterranean maquis, and fields); two touristic magnets, Pisa and Lucca, but the areas in between do not benefit from them; more than 10 abandoned towers watching the former border between the two cities; a dense net of CAI tracks, not all of them used with the same frequency; high research institutes such as CNR, Normale di Pisa University and textile industries in the nearby Prato; fields, olive orchards; etc.
Starting from scientific studies on “Human-Mediated dispersal”, we will use this tool to reshape/regenerate the landscape and all the human and non-human actors will be more o less consciously involved in this scientific process. With minimum interventions in the networks, especially in the ruins, humans, wild animals and domesticated animals will be drawn to them and start walking the parks again, becoming vectors carrying with them seeds that in time will diversify and change the landscape. These interventions will also generate a social shift in the relationship between humans and nature, making the users aware of how their action leave a footprint in the landscape and how they can be part of it again. This new landscape will be flexible to the needs of nature and changing climate, and the interventions too aim at being reversible to comply to what is most necessary at the time to humans, animals and/or plants.
The project connects the natural patches in Monti Pisani so that the landscape can evolve from the collaboration of ecosystems, species, societies and generation