Terrain vague +25. Un’indagine sui territori selvatici secondo il metodo di Ignasi de Solà-Morales.

The subject of the research is "wild territories", a term that may appear as an oxymoron, composed of two words representing opposing concepts. The first, "territory", refers to a defined portion of land of generic dimensions. This can be considered anthropized when visibly altered by human activity and urbanized when it includes constructions and infrastructure. In both cases, the territory is always subject to human control. Franco Farinelli has specified that the concept of territory does not only derive from "land" but also incorporates the terror of political power. In short, "territory" can assume meanings linked to power and control. The term "wild" can be associated with a plant that grows spontaneously and thrives without cultivation, or an animal that lives freely. In a broader sense, "wild" represents everything that develops spontaneously, in an undisciplined manner, and outside of any control. The term "wild" is often used to describe rough, rustic, and uncouth people, while the term "civilized" is used to describe correct, courteous, and well-educated behaviors. Civilized is someone who lives in a territory, presumably urbanized, and is therefore endowed with good manners. The two categories, wild and civilized, are rejected by contemporary anthropological sciences, which interpret them as a legacy of colonialist and discriminatory thought. This classification, often adopted in Western cultures, seeks to identify an "us" (the civilized) and an "other" (the wild). It would seem, therefore, that the two terms only make sense when opposed: the wild is «an idea that revives with the strengthening of its opposite: there is no wild without civilization and vice versa». In summary, on one hand, there is the territory representing civilization, power, and control, and on the other hand, there is the wild, its exact opposite.
\nHowever, some argue, like Annalisa Metta, that the wild itself does not exist. It «is our projection and therefore changes, following the geographies and chronologies of the contexts of reference». It is not, therefore, a universal concept but one of the many ways of observing the world. Therefore, the adjective "wild" can be used to describe those territories subject to the uncontrolled phenomenon of "urban rewilding". Rewilding is the process of returning to a wild state for certain animals or plants that were in a domestic or cultivated condition. In other terms, it can be considered as the reverse process of domestication. This phenomenon can also concern urban space, especially if it involves portions of residual or abandoned land. Considering then that urban rewilding is a phenomenon that affects numerous realities, an in-depth study aimed at the codification of wild territories is urgently needed. Wild territories are urban spaces in balance between control and non-control, places that Robert Venturi might define as complex and contradictory. It is no longer about wild "or" urban spaces, but rather about wild "and" urban spaces. Wild territories include, for example, all those previously exploited urban spaces that are in a state of abandonment or semi-abandonment and present wild characteristics out of control. The definition also includes all residual spaces, which are nothing but the result of an act of architectural design or urban planning. Abandoned and residual spaces represent, in short, the sentinels of the phenomenon of urban rewilding. Symptoms of nature reclaiming urban space mainly manifest in these places. 
\nIn this thesis, the investigation of wild territories was conducted both in terms of criticism of the city and architecture and in terms of urban design and planning. The investigation took place through bibliographic research and the critical observation of some case studies, following a particular method experimented by the Catalan architect Ignasi de Solà-Morales i Rubiò.
\nIn 1996, Ignasi de Solà-Morales i Rubiò, as the curator of the XIX Congress of the International Union of Architects (UIA) held in Barcelona, chose to address the theme of the post-industrial city. The congress exhibition, entitled Present and Futures: Architecture in Cities, sought to open a reflection on the role of the city and architecture of the time through the study of five themes usually unrelated to the discipline: "Mutations," "Flows," "Habitations," "Containers," and "Terrain Vague." For Solà-Morales, the exhibition represented an opportunity to revisit some topics he had already addressed in the past, such as that of the terrain vague. These two words were the title of a conference he held in Montreal (Canada) in 1994, as part of the conference Anyplace, conceived and organized by himself, Peter Eisenman, and Arata Isozaki. His intervention was so successful that it was published both in French and Catalan in the journal Quaderns d’arquitectura i urbanisme in 1996, and in English in the books that collected the proceedings of Anyplace (1995) and Present and Futures: Architecture in Cities (1997). From then on, the theme of the terrain vague became a commonly used topic among architects, landscapers, and urban planners. But what does terrain vague mean? The term consists of two French words. The first, a variant of the French term “terrein”, refers to more or less vast and undefined territories, generic portions of land with their own development potential but to which one is temporarily estranged. The second word, “vague”, has a greater degree of complexity, having a German derivation and two Latin derivations. The German word woge, from which it derives, refers to the swelling of the sea, alluding to movement, oscillation, instability, and fluctuation. Instead, the Latin language provides two derivations, which are vacuus and vagus. The first is translated as "empty" and "unoccupied," and therefore also as "free," "available," and "uncommitted." The second Latin derivation, vagus, can be translated as "indeterminate," "imprecise," and "uncertain." Although they contain the negative prefix, they do not necessarily provide a negative connotation to the terrain vague. Ignasi de Solà-Morales described these places as:
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\n«Here, only a few residual values survive, despite the total disaffection from the activity of the city. These strange places exist outside the city’s effective circuits and productive structures. From the economic point of view, industrial areas, railway stations, ports, unsafe residential neighborhoods, and contaminated places are where the city is no longer. Unincorporated margins, interior islands void of activity, oversights, these areas are simply un-inhabited, un-safe, un-productive. In short, they are foreign to the urban system, mentally exterior in the physical interior of the city, its negative image, as much a critique as a possible alternative».
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\nSolà-Morales, by introducing this theme into the architectural debate, aimed to acknowledge the right of existence of places that, until that moment, were considered useless and unproductive. In the terrain vague, there reside values worthy of consideration. According to him, a good portion of the metropolitan population is highly interested in free and indefinite space as an alternative to the banality of the productive city. The terrain vague, presenting itself as a complex and stratified palimpsest, is capable of conveying historical values much more interesting than the monuments occupying cities. Furthermore, uncertainty, freedom, and emptiness can generate very high expectations for the future. A vacant lot, an abandoned industrial plant, or the residual space created by an infrastructure can potentially become anything. For these reasons, Ignasi de Solà-Morales proposed the maintenance of the terrain vague, defending it from those who would have wanted to convert it into a productive space. He discouraged the use of typical architectural design tools because, as Rem Koolhaas said, «where there is nothing, everything is possible. Where there is architecture, nothing (else) is possible». 
\nMore than twenty-five years after the 1996 Barcelona congress, some of the characteristics of the terrain vague, such as its being residual or abandoned space, have returned to the center of the debate on architecture and the city. Authors such as Patrick Barron, Alan Berger, Alessandro Gabbianelli, Gilles Clément, Christophe Girot, Adriaan Geuze, Sabine Hofmeister, Ingo Kowarik, Manuela Mariani, Annalisa Metta, Pierluigi Nicolin, Franco Purini, Bernardo Secchi, and Paola Viganò have addressed the topic of residual and abandoned urban space in various ways in the first decades of the new century. In general, all agree that new terms and categories are needed to address the issue. Among those who have most influenced the way of understanding such spaces is Gilles Clément, who, with the publication of the Manifesto of the Third Landscape (2004), suggested a valorization of biodiversity present in residual spaces. Clément undoubtedly deserves credit for legitimizing the concept of spontaneous and wild nature as a qualitative element of urban space. From the early 2000s, rejected and forgotten spaces have assumed, as refuges of biodiversity, an important role in the contemporary metropolitan system.
\nAnother useful term to define the phenomenon of spontaneous conversion of urban space into wild is "fourth nature", as reported by the German ecologist Ingo Kowarik. The concept of fourth nature is in continuity with the definitions of the first three "natures" described by John Dixon Hunt in Greater Perfections: The Practice of Garden Theory (2000), which in turn refers to ancient texts. The "first nature" was mentioned by Marcus Tullius Cicero, who, in De Natura Deorum (45 B.C.), described it as a mysterious, frightening forest inhabited by gods. Today, first nature is often defined by the English term "wilderness." The topic of wilderness has been addressed by m

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