Marecchia River Landscape Masterplan

Design team: Enrica Dall'Ara (design lead), Sara Angelini, Matteo Zamagni

The masterplan for a landscape and environmental enhancement of a section of Marecchia river (between the towns of Santarcangelo di Romagna and Torriana, Emilia-Romagna Region, Italy) involves a hybrid landscape, where a remarkable natural context, a rural consolidated territory and a recent urban sprawl are found to coexist, often conflictually and without a particular landscape value.
The project aims at integrating those contexts, retraining the episodes of urban decay and enhancing the main cross connections to the river, according to the following criteria.
– Strengthening all the access ways to the river by a site specific re-landscaping and a new management of the country roads (to be shared between public and private stakeholders), making more evident all the paths which start from the main road (via Santarcangiolese) and penetrate to the river area through a sort of comb-shaped structure. These ways, almost perpendicular to the course of Marecchia, guarantee a direct and immediate approach to the river and to the cycle/foot paths which develop along it.
– Developing the "heads" of the access system by a functional and landscape renewal of the park located in a former quarry (town of Poggio Berni) and the underwater observatory area (town of Torriana).
– Creating a widespread park aimed at promoting all the historical elements, particularly those concerning the so called “industrial archaeologies” (i.e. the ancient mills, the former railway Santarcangelo/San Marino and the mining sites located along the river valley).
– Creating a second "comb" shaped structure, consisting of vegetation, complementary and specular to the one determined by the access network. The green system is designed to make explicit, in terms of landscape perception, the transition between the natural environment, the rural area and the urban one, which develop by nearly parallel strips, between the riverbed and the road to Santarcangelo.