HORTUS CONCLUSUS. The Garden at the heart of Bioregion. Interpretations of idea of ‘microclimate garden’ into the city and landscape construction

Adriano Dessi

2022-01-01

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Abstract

In the contemporary age, in what Pierre Donadieu calls “the economy of itinerancy”, it is necessary to mach the productive and ecological connections between the city and the rural, typical of the Bioregional idea, with strategies that enforce the needs of the ‘man of the city’ to ‘taste’ the Landscape in many ways, in particular through loisir and direct practice. According to french geographer, that is true not only because the presence of ‘pieces of nature’ or ‘pieces of countryside’ near of housing places, is becoming the status symbol of the bourgeois way of living, but mostly, because the contemporary man’s idea about the urban public space is increasingly linked to the place of ‘renewed interaction between man and nature’ and less and less to ‘the space of civil representations’. In that vision, the Garden regains a strong “centre” role in defining of contemporary human habitat, because of its double meaning of useful – but also aesthetic - practices place, it is the space of the domestic dimension but also of the ‘Eco-symbolic’ of the rural one, to quote Berque. The present paper tries to discuss this new “central role” in a new - but also historical – interpretation of the human habitat into the Bio-regional future scenario and planning idea, that increasily seems one of the most important in the contemporary big-scale research. The paper is going to try to highlight how this centrality is more evident and a special feature of the Mediterranean landscape, in which a particular type of European garden, the Hortus Conclusus, is costantly revealed in the human habitat construction and may also be a new necessary start point of landscape construction in the future, mainly based on principles of sustainability.