Milan: greener every day
It can be a whim in the garden of a house or a small plantation on a terrace; the London guerrilla gardening or the spectacular Urban Farms in the “rooftops” of New York, such as the Brooklyn Grange farm. All city councils have proposed in one way or another to offer unbuilt spaces in the city to give citizens the opportunity to grow crops. Now it's Milan , a city always attentive to the new international trends in fashion and design, which also proves to be up to date in terms of movements and concerns of a social and has targeted urban gardens.
Back in 2008, the Milan City Council and the Associazione Italia Nostra Onlus launched a project to dedicate a few hectares of the park Boscoincitta for the use of non-professional growers, with special attention to the elderly. Boscoincittà is a green area of 80 hectares open to the city, with ponds, meadows, woods, and streams: a green lung that, with the orchards, is gaining even more prominence.
Another of the initiatives comes from the architect Claudio Cristofani, who, since 2009, has designed more than 130 orchards in Milan or surroundings . His proposal stems from the need for human beings to work with their own hands, from the pleasure provided by assisting the growth of a plant or a fruit thanks to our care, and from the "humanization" of the food process that involves being able to eat them directly and not be slaves to a long commercial chain in which the product, link after link, loses its essence.
Claudio believes that all green areas in cities must be reinvented and that thousands of orchards can be developed in Milan in the coming years.
Urban Greenhouse Garden is a project of the Office for Urban Transformation (OUT), an organization that defends a new type of urbanism, based on self-production and responsible consumption. Founded eight years ago in Milan, it now also operates in Bilbao and Mexico City.
And so that we can enjoy the products of urban agriculture, this year Erba Brusca opened its doors, a restaurant that follows this trend . It is located on the border between the countryside and the city, and the architectural project is by Rgasestudio. The atmosphere is familiar and close, the materials used in the interior design are natural, there are bottles of wine placed on shelves made with simple wooden boxes for transporting fruit, and the glass windows allow you to see the plantations. Hence the name: there is grass everywhere. The dishes are cooked with products from the small gardens that surround the restaurant, and use natural ingredients of a seasonal nature.
"Green, I love you green. Green wind. Green branches," said Lorca's poem. If he composed these verses for a gypsy drama, now could become the mantra of long-suffering urbanites around the globe . To cultivate at least one square meter of land and see how a tomato-tomato ripens and what it tastes like.
Crops in Erba Brusca