Running with Nature: From Mountain Trails to Urban Life
At Myplant & Garden, Aurora Bosia shared a personal and professional reflection on the relationship between movement, landscape, and wellbeing, bridging her experience as a skyrunner with her work in shaping cities.
What does skyrunning have to do with designing cities?
At My Plant & Garden, Aurora Bosia, landscape architect at LAND, took the stage to explore one of the most personal and thought-provoking questions she carries with her daily: what can the mountain teach us about how we move through the city?
Aurora lives in Lecco, works in Milan, and competes in skyrunning, but like most of us, the majority of her time is spent in the city. That tension is exactly where her talk began.
Mountain as a Lens
Trail running and skyrunning are not just sports. Aurora framed them around three values she believes are just as relevant in urban design as they are on a mountain trail: community, connection, and wellbeing. These disciplines are about belonging to something larger than yourself, inhabiting landscapes with your body, and testing your own limits, physically and mentally.
There is a fundamental difference between getting from the necessity of going from a place to another, and truly moving through a city, which is a need. Getting around is about function, speed, and efficiency. Moving is about experience, connection to Nature, conscious engagement with space, and wellbeing. Running clubs are multiplying across Milan. People are collectively reclaiming urban space as a place for movement, encounter, and social life. As one headline put it, running clubs have become the new frontier of social connection for an entire generation.
Designing for Movement
According to Aurora, cities need to invest in four things: safe cycling and pedestrian infrastructure; continuous and accessible green spaces, not isolated spots but connected systems; flexible open areas that can adapt to how people want to use them throughout the day; and outdoor spaces that make physical activity a natural part of urban life.
This is what LAND pursues at every scale. As demonstrates Parco del Portello, projects are built on the conviction that public space is not a residual element of the city; it is its foundation.
As Aurora said: the mountain can teach us how to move, but the city has to let us do it.
