The design of green spaces in shrinking small villages. Nature-based strategies and devices for the planning action in a case-study

Abstract

The article explores the design of green spaces in shrinking small centers, focusing on a case study, Ebbio, a sixteenth-century rural settlement in the Apennines of Piacenza, in the Nure Valley. The contribution adopts a double approach: on the one hand, it investigates the spatial figures put in place to activate regeneration processes of small centers affected by emptying and depopulation, with ample potential to contribute to the ecological network and environmental rebalancing and, from the other, it examines the planning devices that use green materials to recreate forms of living, in places where this is in crisis and the built heritage is obsolete, neglected and seems to be turning towards inevitable decay. The article starts by presenting and discussing the discipline for open spaces in the historic settlements included in the municipal plan; it then presents and comments four scenarios focusing on the design of open spaces with a dominant of vegetation, that are the outcome of a planning workshop, also presented through a selection of the works. In the conclusion, some prerogatives of nature-based strategies and devices in shrinking small villages offered by the case-study are presented and discussed.