Agricultural Urbanism in Marrakech

Area 08 – Ingegneria civile e Architettura

An urban design, that takes the landscape as a focal point to a different way of thinking about the Forma Urbis, seem to find in the synthesis between city and country renewed stimuli and more adherents forms of life in which to live, grow and enjoy nature and are increasingly taking a central role. Agrarian Urbanism has recently become a buzzword for those who think of designing or re-establish parts of the city. A method of planning and design that incorporates and enhances farming promoting economic, environmental and social benefits and that affects the center of the city until rural edge. Basic reasons plus a factor no less important than the aesthetic quality, the "beauty" in the final analysis of the new conurbations, embellished by beauty of the useful of which are still witness all agricultural landscapes in the world. This publication, dedicated to Morocco and one of his most beautiful and celebrated city, Marrakech, is a useful educational experiment in this direction. It was shaping new parts of the city expanding recovering agriculture, traditional cultural and economic factors of Morocco, in the new districts. A process of hybridization of living traditions of this place with the opportunities offered by cultural practices that bring economic and environmental benefits in an urban context characterized by a pre-existing poor economy and by different forms of progressive environmental degradation. This resulted in ideas and solutions to a teaching experience, with some overspill utopian, which demonstrated the fertility of the logical process. Beautiful designs and stimulating the morphological configurations that give hope for the future continuation of the research in aesthetic and environmental implications, in the wake of the idea of garden city that remains a key unresolved of contemporary landscape.

SINTESI