Techno-natural scenarios for the city of Prato

“The plan is a hybrid of ecology, technology and the human environment, replacing ecological logics with urban ones. Horizontal and performative surfaces are enhanced over the conventional architectural volumes,” says Elisa Cristiana Cattaneo. Contaminating different disciplines is not only the approach of the Operational Plan of the Municipality of Prato that launched in September 2018, but also the method chosen by the urban planner Cattaneo and art historian Emilia Giorgi to curate the exhibition "Verde Prato. Urban experiments between ecology and reuse" at the Luigi Pecci Centre for Contemporary Art. “The idea is to tell the Operative Plan in a space usually dedicated to contemporary arts, not just with a technical language but trying to establish a hybrid narrative, connecting the different aspects of what will be the future idea of Prato,” says Giorgi. Divided into three sections – Ecology, Re-Use and Going Public – the plans are combined with installations, photographic investigations and videos, held together by the ‘exhibition machine’ conceived by Fosbury Architecture studio, which recalls those of the theatre.

The project recently presented by the Tuscan city’s planning office is the conceptual and methodological son of the Structural Plan conceived between 1993 and 1996 by Bernardo Secchi, who with his work contributed to the origin of landscape urbanism, a theory that the best way to organise cities is through the design of the landscape, rather than the construction of its buildings.
The integration of urban planning and ecology is certainly the most innovative aspects of the plan. A techno-nature is proposed: “that is, nature understood as a technological device, to experiment its theoretical-methodological, operational and linguistic potential,” explains Cattaneo.

“Nature is considered in the Operational Plan mainly according to three categories: as performativity, understood as technology and productivity (Stefano Mancuso’s studies and installation Urban Jungle are oriented in this sense); as symbiosis, understood as reciprocal modification with culture (as expressed in Stefano Boeri's Urban Forestation project); as resilience, i.e. as places with transformative potential (for example, in the formulation of standards as areas of process transformation).” The gaze of photographer Maurizio Montagna is also turned to the vegetable world. With his project Paregon, created specifically for the exhibition, "he intercepts the way in which greenery reappropriates the built city, suggesting ways for a new collective action and changing our perspective coordinates after centuries of anthropocentric vision," says Giorgi.

The EP1 – Braided Landscape robotic machine was also designed to represent the complexity of the city conceived as a living and changing organism. This interactive installation interprets a "transformable landscape above which a series of mobile elements take on infinite spatial and temporal configurations, depending on a system of invisible forces below," according to Cattaneo. Finally, following the principles of philosopher Murray Bookchin, who linked ecological and social issues, the plan stems from a long and careful process of citizen participation, which served as the basis for its drafting. This aspect has been rendered within the exhibition with the integration of a theatre that during the opening days will host discussions and workshops.