Sustainable cities and territories of Trentino Alto Adige. Pino Scaglione

This issue of EcoWebTown is edited by TALL* (the Trentino Alto Adige/Advanced Land-scape Design Lab), an Observatory between the university and society wich the mission it is to start -from its privileged location as a research institute at the University of Trento- has set itself the task of intensifying relationships with the local territory and cities of the Trentino and the Alto Adige, by setting up a jointly-run international Workshop at which many universities work jointly on a range of shared research pathways, projects, and strategic decision-making, developing future visions to create an enhanced awareness of environmental consistency in the culture of urbanism, architecture, and landscape.

Some previous research and initiatives of this project, named “Slow City”, were specifically concerned with the cities of Trento, Rovereto, Merano, and Bolzano and are partly summarised in this book. They included workshops, teaching, and collaborative research to which international researchers, teachers, authors, and performance artists contributed, and made it possible to outline a more original, more specific physiognomy for the model of future territorial, urban and landscape development in the Trentino and the Alto Adige/South Tyrol, by paying greater attention to the availability of natural and manmade resources. These activities have been increasing awareness about issues of urban, environmental, landscape, and architectural quality and are bringing our work more and more into line with the most advanced research being taken forward elsewhere in Europe. The Slow City idea came into existence in 2007 as spin-off from MANIFESTA - an artistic event of European and international importance that was held in various event-places located along the Adige Valley. MANIFESTA revealed that these places are in effect a city of multiple centres embraced by very beautiful Alpine landscapes and interconnected by the A22 motorway: a city that possesses a rich culture of ancient and contemporary history and art, is endowed with splendid vineyards, fine vintages and excellent local food, has an active and industrious population, and can boast of a network of museums whose quality is unmatched almost anywhere else in Europe. Here slowness is a value and a lifestyle choice: an achievement. Slowness stands for quality, but moves “quickly” and does not disdain progress, indeed assists it; slowness as a friend of the environment that lives sustainably with a light touch, in the midst of nature.

Slowness that means rare, wholesome things of quality that gratify the senses and which, when adopted as the core of a new ethics, generate ideas about how we need to reconfigure the relationship between nature and settlement by carefully, intelligently using the tools of contemporary design to transform our physical surroundings in more innovative, original ways that are responsive to context, landscape, and ecology. Slow City first began as a newly defined cultural pathway that redefined architecture and urban planning as civil arts concerned with landscapes and sustainability whose role is to identify new urban policies that can become the public, participatory expression of a renewed ethics based on cities that live in equilibrium with nature, ameliorating the conditions of human life and settlement and offering an alternative to the highly artificial concept of cities as total development. Now Slow City is followed by “Cities in Nature”, a stable cultural and research project that will set out a clear strategy for identifying sensitive points in the cities and territories of the Trentino-Alto Adige and will introduce new cultural processes and devices, carrying out design exercises in which all can participate and that will open the way to new, socially integrated urban and environmental forms and conditions that diffuse the idea of quality, and are richly biodiverse and sustainable.

*TALL-Design Lab research activities (description form)
The TALL (Trentino Alto Adige/Advanced Land-scape design Lab) Observatory/Laboratory -which operates in the School of Engineering/Architecture of Trento  University, to give space to the needs of training and advanced design of the area- coordinates design research activities -in collaboration with national and international universities and professional partners- open to architects, engineers, urban planners, landscape architects, designers and students. Often based on local and international calls for participation, they explore challenges and trends in architecture and urban places and cities, of the product design, and overall in the design of outdoor  spaces, with the collaboration of industries and crafts workshops, building companies, public administrations. These activities (developed by seminar, lectures, workshops, over the official academics courses) simultaneously allow for the selected -in collaboration with visiting architects, designers, creatives- to develop new architectural, urban and a product design ideas, new concepts that aim to contribute to the development of the experiences of students -in the complex discipline of the interscalar design- overall as well as to nurture their respective, intensive professional practice in the scholars itinerary.
(Coordinator of TALL/Trentino AltoAdige Advanced Land-scape design Lab is the Professor Architetct Pino Scaglione)