Intermediate landscapes: public spaces of experimentation

Abstract

When planning a new intervention in the city with a complex and sometimes violent past, such as Sarajevo, the aspect of time is particularly important. The blooming of a landscape has not the same speed of the fast-changing urban conditions. There is an absence of synchronization. Agriculture and agricultural practices help shortening this gap, giving immediate meaning to these spaces, and offering a glimpse on the time passing. The goal is to make the space useful and meaningful, with the resources already present and very few time. Students and people from the neighborhood can engage with the soil from the first moment, work with it, try new techniques and learn from it. The area becomes a symbol for experimentation. The city is given an enclave, a cultural reservoir where experiments become useful not only to the students (in this case) but to the community in general. The spaces for agriculture are alternated to open lawns and public areas where inhabitants can spend time. In this way, experimentation is showcased to people and is likely to spread and rise interest.

The site is, therefore, an open laboratory, immediately readable and comprehensible to all. The urban field is now a privileged area for diverse research in a public manner.
This originates a new type of evocative space, an intermediate landscape between agriculture and public space, that may sparkle playful social practices, shared between different groups. The main goal underlying this type of space is firstly aesthetic but also scientific.
Meanwhile, the surrounding area is planted with a growing forest resulting into a large intervention of reforestation. The produced urban space, this micro forest for agricultural experimentations set himself in a new relationship with nature. On one hand, we are in front of a process of re-appropriation by nature of the human space, on the other hand, man is engaging with the soil to benefit from it.
Nor man, nor nature is now prevailing but we find ourselves in front of a process of action and reaction. The man observes and allows nature to develop and reacts to it only when its own survival sphere is touched.

The site becomes now a metaphor for a laboratory dedicated to the relationship between man and its territory, in order to research how to reach a situation of balance.