Today’s city asks us to design with greater attention and subtlety. Ways of living and moving are changing, the pace of transformation is shifting, and the demand for open spaces that offer quality and opportunities for social interaction is growing. At the same time, the environmental context is becoming more variable. Climate events increasingly affect how streets, squares, parks, and soils function.

In this scenario, urban and landscape design are not merely decorative elements of transformation. They represent a cultural and environmental infrastructure. They are the spaces where daily well-being and collective identity are built through solutions that are simultaneously civic, spatial, and technical.

For us, this transformation aligns with a broader principle. Regeneration does not mean adding new elements. It means reintegrating what already exists. We often work in contexts where the built heritage and open spaces form a single organism: abandoned areas, interstitial voids, infrastructural margins, and complexes to be repurposed. Here, urban design naturally engages with adaptive reuse. The project becomes a practice of continuity that enhances existing structures, reduces impact, and reactivates economies and uses. When transformation unfolds over long periods, we introduce meanwhile uses, temporary, reversible, lightweight interventions that activate public space immediately, test scenarios, build consensus, and reduce risk even before the project is complete.

In recent years, we have consolidated a path that has brought us, confidently, into the geography of the most compelling practices in contemporary urbanism and landscape design. This evolution is built on projects, internal expertise, methods, and applied research, creating an increasingly robust capacity to approach open space as a technical, social, and ecological field simultaneously.

Our starting point is a simple triad that guides every decision:

People
Designing public space means caring for everyday life. We focus on thermal comfort, real accessibility, perceived safety, continuity between inside and outside, and opportunities for pause and social interaction. We design places that work for different uses and different bodies without hierarchy. These are spaces that do not require permission to be experienced but invite appropriation and coexistence.

Places
Every context is a living archive of traces: morphologies, memories, invisible geographies, seasonal cycles, economies, and desires. For this reason, we avoid replicable formats. We read the soil, topography, mobility networks, built heritage, and spontaneous ecologies as design materials. We seek reinterpretation, not replication, a precise response that is recognizable because it emerges from that place and only that place. From this perspective, urban regeneration also becomes a matter of sequencing: phases, thresholds, intensity of use, temporality, and progressive transformations so that the space remains inhabitable and meaningful throughout the process.

Planet
For us, sustainability is not a checklist of reductions. It is a practice of care that works with living systems. Here, two areas of expertise are central and non-negotiable: soil regeneration and water resilience.

Soil regeneration: designing from below

Soil rarely takes center stage in design, yet it is one of our most complex infrastructures. It retains water and carbon, hosts biodiversity, records industrial and climate transformations, and directly influences the health of a place. When soil is degraded or contaminated, it is not just a technical issue. It is a social, ecological, and cultural one.

For this reason, we are developing research focused on soil as a design material, not as a neutral background but as an active partner. This means approaching regeneration even where it seems impossible, on compromised areas, urban interstices, and sites marked by abandonment, while recognizing the capacity of living systems to self-repair if supported. We work on renaturalization processes, depavement, increased permeability, biodiversity, and long-term fertility. This is a shift in perspective. The quality of public space is measured not only on the surface but also in depth.

Water resilience: from emergency to system
Water in cities today swings between extremes. There is too much, too little, often polluted, often poorly managed. Translating this complexity into design means moving from a defensive approach that protects from events to a systemic one that retains, infiltrates, slows, reuses, and makes cycles visible.

Our research on water resilience focuses on strategies applicable at urban and territorial scales. These include sponge landscapes, draining soils, rain gardens and bioswales, floodable civic spaces, integrated micro-basins and retention systems, water recovery and reuse, and blue-green connections that enhance microclimates and biodiversity. We are not interested in iconic solutions. We seek solutions that work, endure, can be managed, and improve over time.

A method that unites research and design

This maturity also stems from constant dialogue with Plus and our research tools, including environmental analyses, prototyping, experimentation, and the construction of common metrics and lexicons. For us, research is not a separate chapter. It is a lens that makes design more precise, legible, and responsible. This is where our ambition in urban and landscape design lies. We bring architectural attention to detail into open space while simultaneously incorporating the logic of living systems into compositional choices. A practice we call urban mending, repairing relationships between people, places, and the planet, working with soil and water as foundational materials, not constraints to be hidden. Today, we are ready to declare this clearly. Open space is one of our most fertile fields of design. We approach it with a mindset that balances imagination and performance, beauty and responsibility, everyday life and ecological cycles.

Foto di Nicola Colella