Living in the Peri-Urban, Planning the Peri-Urban

The aim of this essay is to think over spatial and social dimension of the peri-urban, with an explorative and conjectural attitude, focusing on the project intended as creative "professional practice" (Schon, 1993) which generates awareness. As Mariavaleria Mininni (2012) has stressed, the peri-urban is not so much a topographical space as an abstraction defining a design and relational character of the space. From this visual perspective, it can become an amazing laboratory of ideas and practices where the transformations both of settlement and residual forms of agricultural areas carry the sign of the present critical situation but at the same time they result the most dynamic and vital ones. And it is just in this condition of the contemporary world that the designer has to look at, by clearly taking his own point of view and consequently directing his action.