When the growth of the town produces gardens

Abstract

The metropolis is a mother of gardens (Migge, 1919): in the beginning of the twenty century, Leberecht Migge understood that the housing reform of the Modern Movement was also the reform of the urban orchards that could expand in wide common spaces between the buildings. The parks, in which the towns finally could stay in, included a humanized nature, organized in productive and leisure areas. Migge’s envisagement of “Stadtland” had many affinities with the “Extending town” by Giuseppe Samonà based on the shape as single matrix of built and cultivated spaces (Samonà, 1976). Both architects, forty years from each other and in different places of work - Germany and Italy - considered urban and rural parts of the metropolis as connected in a relationship of necessity: the big town need gardens and the crisis of the agriculture production can be partially solved thanks to the urbanization. This statement has a great potential to be explored today when, step by step, the soils are recognizing as “cultural heritage” (CoE, 2016), like archaeological or architectural monuments, to be protected and involved in the material and immaterial values of the community. People should, again, “practice”, frequent the land in order to be aware of the rural dimensions of the sprawl town. On the wake of Migge and Samonà’s ideas, as well the town producing gardens as qualified inter-scalar design can, at least, give a contribute to save the soils.