The Residual is the place of contact between further urban expansions, an enclosed space to be regenerated, a void to be preserved and an opportunity to create new relations in the collapsed territory. There is no more available space to build again, it is necessary to work "in between", to recover and re-generate what has remained: post-industrial relicts, handkerchiefs of land enclosed by infrastructures, suburban countryside. These are all residues where references are absent or weak, unsustainable holes with no relations and quality, demanding care and attention. The research proposes a change of direction: starting from a careful reading and interpretation of these "dispersion landscapes", it elaborates some original hypotheses to open those selected areas ("residual landscapes") to re-qualification dynamics. As the neighbourhood has been the research site for urban project during the XIX century, "void" - always full of latent signs, mixed uses and memories - becomes the crucial occasion for the design of contemporary public space, open to the scale of landscape. The research continues by tracing the conditions of fertility inside these complex areas ("fertile landscapes"), references for the investigational process and strategic tools to operate the transformation (i.e. solving critical tensions and opening potential values). Residual spaces are changing areas, places with no fixed forms, structurally unstable, uncertain. they are "stand-by landscapes", which gives the idea of waiting and precious opening to identity integration, but also suggests potential movement and change. Thanks to this availability non-lieux become "strategic landscapes", testing design fields and units from which regeneration starts. Shapeless voids, if well designed in their internal tissue and put in relation one to the other, become dynamic systems for the re-development of critical contexts, fertile terrain with materials and traces for the re-construction of the future landscape. The discarded gap thus brings the value of suspension and assumes a new meaning, through the actions of architectural project: defining borders and figures (a line or a tree row), creating links (a path), layering (an excavation) or releasing (a specific opening). Due to the designer's vision, the void becomes a new open centrality, in space and time, an opportunity to re-compose contemporary landscape in terms of form, structure and balance.

Anna Arioli