OC OPEN CITY International Summer School 2017 edition, in continuity with the issues addressed in the previous editions, focuses on the many complementary forms of landscape that are recognizable in the enlarged territory of the city of Piacenza, taken as an exemplary case study of the contemporary state of the city and territory. According to the most recent and innovative disciplinary researches, the background springs from integration among global scenarios (which European cities have to face with, because of the strong changes in social, economic and environmental balances) and local architectural transformations, which are necessary for regeneration of dismissed areas.

The “New Next Nature” (the title of the International workshop) - proposed to students as a basis for discussion and an interdisciplinary comparison and as a subject of project experimentation, comes from a thematic matrix capable of reinterpreting the relationship architecture-city-landscape in contemporaneity and with a look at future visions. Students are called to imagine “Scenarios for Piacenza 2050” through the use and integration of innovative forms of nature into the city. In particular, projects - communicated through posters, utopian visions, models and installations - will give answers to questions that are the basis of the spatiality of our contemporary era: - What shapes will cities in the future have? - How can we imagine a rebalancing between artifice and nature in urban and metropolitan habitats? - Can the city-nature / city-future ( città-natura / città futura) slogan become the emblem of the future of our lands and landscapes?