Urban Forestation, Taranto

A regeneration of nature’s elements: The Municipality of Taranto, through a European tendering procedure, awarded us the contract to design a scheme for upgrading, redeveloping, and reactivating a degraded area of the Tamburi District. This is a testament to their commitment to the project. Our vision is to create an ‘urban forestation‘, a unique blend of nature and urban development, with extensive areas for phytoremediation and a public park with facilities.

Through the implementation of a cultivation strategy, the challenge to “work with nature” has been taken up by making the soil, water and greenery the levers for a new liveability. The project consists of entrusting the task of reclaiming and regenerating to the elements of nature, bringing to new life what the pollutants of the ILVA steel company have contaminated over time—an unusual endeavour in an extraordinary context from the point of view of the change of the overall paradigm. The experimental and innovative project is based on the activity of associated phytoremediation with the “water towers”, with the pumping of groundwater, its treatment, and reuse for washing the terrain and sub-irrigation. All this with complete visibility because “reclamation must come out of the darkness: it is an ethical issue that becomes aesthetic, and Taranto must become a platform for scientific exchange and specific expertise,” says Andreas Kipar.

For Mayor R. Melucci, “This project is the mother in symbolic terms of all the efforts that the institutions are making to enable Taranto to relaunch”.