landscapes of water Prà dei Gai

landscapes of water
Prà dei Gai, a new centrality in a diffused territory?
Type: report, 2007
International EMU design workshop
Conegliano, April 28 > May 5, 2007
Consorzio di Bonifica Sinistra Piave, Dipartimento di Urbanistica Università IUAV
coord. Paola Viganò
organization: Uberto degli Uberti, Giambattista Zaccariotto


1 A DESIGN AND A RESEARCH WORKSHOP
The expansion of a natural flooding basin at Prà dei Gai, near Conegliano and not far from Venice, is the starting point of the design workshop and an interesting occasion to reflect on some crucial themes about the contemporary territory. They concern its way of functioning, its safety, its different landscapes, the social practices in a dispersed and mixed condition.

Starting from the complex system of water in the Veneto region and from the need of a safer territory, the workshop will explore the possible integration of a few hundreds of hectares of cultivated land along the Livenza river in a new system of open spaces for public and collective practices. The workshop has the aim to contribute to the construction of a place of exchange among different disciplines and knowledge involved in the construction of the Prà dei Gai project: hydraulic engineers, architects, landscape architects and urbanists, botanists, biologists and ecologists..The workshop is also part of a wider research1 that observes the Veneto region and its emerging paradoxes starting form its main infrastructural layers: water and asphalt. The research hypothesis is that today the fundamental elements of the territorial support, the hydraulic regime and the

road system, must be invested of new relationships and meanings. How can they participate to the construction of a new inhabited landscape?