About Agricultural Space in the Città Diffusa and Its Importance for the Future

This book proposes a project of extended requalification for the territories of settlement dispersion and diffusion; a project on a territorial scale that uses the specific characteristics of this space as its diffuse network of infrastructures. It is a project imagined in a context of economic, social, and environmental crisis, in which a new urban question has emerged. To indicate the principal characteristics of a possible project for these territories, the research study uses the term ‘project of isotropy’. The metropolitan area of Venice, criss-crossed by dense water and road networks, is the test case for imagining the concept. The ‘Project of Isotropy’ is the acknowledgement of a territorial specificity, a scenario to be investigated in its manifold consequences, and a design hypothesis that can be concretely devised in terms of intervention regarding the water system, roads and public transport, alternative mobility, forms of diffused welfare, innovative agriculture, and the decentralized production of energy. The hypothesis is that new conditions now exist for re-devising the isotropic space in the metropolitan area of Venice. My contribution focuses on the central role of agriculture in this new isotropic, horizontal metropolis.