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5. CITY OF CARE
Lecture
[2023]

Intervention for the course "The City of Care" at Politecnico di Milano. The research identified a range of critical issues related to the climate crisis, acknowledging that its consequences are not only environmental but also social, political, geopolitical, and economic.
Various themes were addressed, including the concept of borders and barriers, the evolving role of the designer, how creativity can act as a powerful vehicle for generating innovative and transformative solutions.

Analizing boundaries, the idea was to highlight different concepts, especially highlighting the relationship between natural and human boundaries. On the border with Mexico, the wall that was built had effects on the natural ecosystem that had been totally ignored, showing that we no longer think in relation to the ecosystem around us.
This is because man's perception of the boundary is so far removed from nature's concept of boundaries. For man they are lines, which divide and cannot be inhabited. For nature, boundaries are areas, zones, that divide but like all other areas are inhabited and part of the territory.

Designers have to understand how to channel energies and creativity to generate common good and overturn a bit the preconceptions on which cities to date are based, working in synergy with nature and extrapolating design opportunities to try to generate the most collective good possible.
Benthemplein Square - Rotterdam shows us how in urban design it takes little to take inspiration from nature and include some of its paradigms in urban and anthropological planning. Rotterdam it is below sea level and prone to flooding, particularly in rainy seasons. In a scenario where eliminating the problem is not a viable option, the solution was to shape the city's form around the problem.
So, the idea of turning Benthemplein Square into a kind of water catchment area was born.
The square itself is a fully functioning plaza with basketball and volleyball courts, skating rinks and other gathering spaces, but it is also designed to fill with rainwater to prevent flooding. It has a dual function as a hub for leisure activities and a kind of security blanket for the city.

Cocluding analyzing design, that has a crucial role to play in finding a solution, and to stimulate in people a common recognition of complexity, being a fundamental repair tool, a change of course and perspective.
It must create a detachment from anthropocentric design, and see nature as the best inventor, who never stops outdoing itself, invents, designs, creates, destroys: “cradle to cradle.”

Figures such as designers cannot stand alone and will need a series of relationships with other fields to find creative, technological and effective solutions for our complex world.
Artists, engineers, scientists and politicians will not have to work in isolation, but will have to interact continuously.
This interaction will create transdisciplinarity, an osmotic process between several elements that meet each other and tend to influence each other to create something new.