Parco della Cappuccina: A Green Ribbon Reconnecting Carpi’s History and Nature
Located southwest of the city of Carpi, near the historic city centre, the Parco della Cappuccina emerges as a transformative urban area, spanning 5.5 hectares. Before the intervention, the area was an uncultivated and impassable area initially intended for the expansion of the cemetery and adjacent to other green urban spaces.
The project aims to transform the area into a public space capable of integrating into the city as an element of reconnection between the historic center, the residential neighborhoods, and the agricultural territory, becoming a driver of social and environmental relations. It partially retakes its agricultural vocation by proposing a new concept of urban park.
The project takes shape starting from a strongly identitarian concept, as it takes as its compositional model the founding geometries of the Carpi agricultural landscape (the network of fields, present in the area at least until the 1950s). An ecological and economic operation has been made: out of the total of 5.5 hectares, the park provides only for 1.4 hectares of “equipped park”, while the remaining areas are returned to nature and to the agricultural memory of the territory, thus brought back to cultivation of mixed fields with wild meadows.
At the heart of this transformation lies a process of re-establishing the relationship between the city and its history. A sprawling “PARTERRE OF FIELDS” unfolds, its gaze directed towards the cemetery’s backdrop, inviting a fresh perspective on this landmark. This intervention reinterprets the surviving agricultural area within the city by restoring the pre-industrial agricultural grid.
Within the fields a “LINEAR PARK” emerges as a carefully curated space for public enjoyment. This ribbon of green meanders through the landscape, not encompassing the entire area but rather establishing a crucial missing link between the historic center and the agricultural territory. It seamlessly connects the existing complex of public spaces and functions, including urban gardens, the Martiri delle Foibe Park, schools, woodland, and a social center.
This area of about 1.4 hectares houses all the classic park functions: walking, resting studying, events, reading, and sports, on the grassy areas and on the paved and equipped areas. The characteristic elements are two: the white ribbon of the footpath, a key connection that recomposes the entire system of surrounding green areas, and the sculptural element of the “Filo di Carpi”(Thread of Carpi): a system of metal sculptures that connote the area. The “Filo”, an inevitable reference to the weft and fabrics of the Carpi textile district, is the landmark that connects the various parts of the park, sewing the ground, entering and leaving the meadow, and reappearing where something needs to happen.
The PARTERRE OF FIELDS, occupying the majority of the area (approximately 4 hectares), embodies a low-intervention approach, minimizing management and maintenance costs. It comprises a grid of fields that hold both historical significance and ecological value, promoting biodiversity and safeguarding soil fertility. The parterre unfolds as a succession of meadows and “tall” crops (flowers, alfalfa, wheat), punctuated by the “groove” of the linear park.
In essence, the Parco della Cappuccina’s design process mirrors a profoundly physical act: the gesture of the sower who transforms the land into a harvest and the gesture of the man who, to live and inhabit a place, crosses it by trampling on the grass of the fields, tracing the path, leaving the furrow.
The project also includes the modification of rainwater management, passing from the discharge into the sewer system to the slow on-site lamination of rainwater through the creation of a compluvium, for a change of paradigm towards greater sustainability.
The entire project is based on a flexible and innovative management approach, a guarantee of resilience. The project is, in fact, characterized by a flexibility in terms of time and density/intensity of interventions: the parterre of fields is characterized by an alternation of wild meadows and annual or perennial crops (which defines a dichotomy between areas that have an environmental value and areas that have an agricultural value), which is not fixed and immutable. The design can be articulated over time based on the priority objectives of the Administration, the assessment of the socio-economic context and the aspects that it is wanted to privilege: biodiversity rather than productivity, rather than actions of sociality and environmental education.
Other landscape architecture offices involved in the design of landscape: Elisa Ferretti Architetto
Architecture offices involved in the design: Marzia Zamboni Architettura, Arianna Bordina Architetto, Anna Bonvicini Architetto
Location: Parco della Cappuccina, Viale dei Cipressi, 42012, Carpi (MO), Italy
Design year: 2020-2021
Year Completed: 2023
