Glossary of ideas for a metropolis based around biodiversity.
A new book by Stefano Boeri, which brings together ideas, reflections and projects arisen from the collaboration between a number of planners, designers, artists, researchers, students and others.
Milan, like every city in the world, today, is at a crossroads. It can continue growing by eating up agricultural land, woods, natural space, and thus reducing biodiversity and the space available to other species. Or it can choose to become a bio-diverse metropolis, starting with a new agreement between the city, the natural world and agriculture.
Biomilano is a a glossary, a mosaic, which includes fragments from various disciplines and methodologies and practices which are mixed and variable. These range from ideas and projects linked to biology, architects, agronomists, politicians and ordinary citizens.
These entries are accompanied by highly-detailed illustrations which, alongside the text, create a ‘verbal-visual’ dictionary that sits at the border between utopia and reality. Seen together, these entries form a complex scenario, which is self-indulgent and often ironic, and which is re-assembled and put into visual context in the second part of the volume.
Only as we move away from the image of the Biomilano-city do things really come into focus, until the whole takes on the form of a place which, in many ways, is already amongst us.
Biomilano illustrates six projects – Global kitchen Gardens for Milan Expo 2015, Metrowood, Verical Forest, Wood House, Farms, Urban Ruralities – outlining the economic and territorial energies which are needed in order to arrive at a new balance between the urban sphere, rural areas (cultivated forms of nature) and the natural world.
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Published by Corraini Edizioni
Edited by Michele Brunello and Sara Pellegrini