The role of green spaces and forestation in urban planning processes: new principles and new representations

This paper addresses the close relationship between representation and green design, attributing a central role to landscape in the relationship between the built environment and nature. This issue is now more crucial than ever in any intervention in public space, with more compelling connotations within historic and monu mental urban fabrics, but also in more recently formed urban fabrics and peri-urban areas. Climate change, urbanization, emerging new technologies, the progres sive loss of biodiversity and growing inequality urgently require real solutions. It is necessary to rethink the way we live, redesigning the balance between the system and the individual, and re-evaluating the way we design and govern our cities. What we need to do is start again with the plan that current laws (Emilia-Romagna Regional Law No. 24/2017) require to be attentive to the main challenges of the 21st century, imagining the city of the future as relational and socially inclusive, productive, green and sustainable. Cities, where public space returns to the forefront to the point that the territory and its design become bio-political, present urgent environmental, climatic, economic and social challenges that require ambitious design solutions to achieve completely decarbonized cities. Acting on the identity and morphological-spatial reconfiguration of empty spaces, on the performance and environmental requirements of open space, means intervening on the landscape, urban and otherwise, which in Italian and European culture identifies the primary cultural asset on which to base any action of transformation, protec tion and enhancement of design requirements.