GIARDINO PRIMARO / PRIMARO GARDEN
GIARDINO PRIMARO - ARGENTA GREEN & BLUE INFRASTRUCTURE
A 21,945 m² green-blue regeneration project in central Argenta that turns a former transit area into a hybrid garden. By redesigning a road, a historic garden and a school-side lawn, Giardino Primaro increases permeability, biodiversity and water retention while creating inclusive spaces to meet, play, rest and learn. The project reconnects the town with its hidden water landscape and rebuilds a sense of belonging.
Italy
Via Matteotti, Argenta, Ferrara, different areas
Prototype level
No
Yes
Yes
Yes
ERDF : European Regional Development Fund
The project has been funded by the Emilia-Romagna region through the European Regional Development Funds. The call that supported the initiative has been promoted by the Regional Government Resolution 1243/2023 “Call for the Design and Implementation of Green and Blue Infrastructure in Urban and Peri‑Urban Areas” and co-funded by the Municipality of Argenta.
No
38001: Argenta (IT)
Giardino Primaro is a green-blue public space regeneration project that transforms 21,945 m² of central Argenta from a transit-dominated area into a hybrid garden for slowing down, staying, playing and learning. It reconnects the town with the memory of the Po di Primaro riverbed and with the nearby freshwater landscapes of the Po Delta Park. The project is organised into four interrelated areas: the river road, where the present carriageway is reduced, traffic-calmed and partly desealed; the river dunes, with rain-garden devices, riparian vegetation and cycle-pedestrian paths; the forest garden, which reinterprets the historic garden as a biodiverse and playable landscape; and the urban woodland in the school area, where around 145 new trees form a new ecological and educational threshold. The project pursues four objectives: climate adaptation through water retention, cooling and lower pollution; more and better public space and cultural ecosystem services; stronger physical and symbolic connections between the town centre and the Po Delta Park; and renewed public awareness of Argenta's water-based identity and the fragility of its plain landscape. Because the intervention faces Argenta's main school area, students, families and everyday users are among the primary beneficiaries, while the redesigned public realm will also serve the wider community of around 8,000 residents in the capital and 21,600 across the municipality.
BELONGING
TRANSFORM
NATURAL HERITAGE
WATER
PLAY & INTERPLAY
The project demonstrates strong alignment with NEB values and is supported by an ongoing environmental certification process that accompanies all phases of Giardino Primaro, ensuring measurable impact indicators (e.g. runoff reduction, biodiversity monitoring metrics) and strengthening evaluation robustness.
The project strongly aligns with the values of the NEB and is supported by an ongoing environmental certification process (SITES), which guides every phase of Giardino Primaro. This certification framework ensures that the project delivers measurable impact through a series of carefully defined environmental and social parameters. Central to this approach is the conservation of habitats for threatened and endangered species, safeguarding urban biodiversity and creating conditions for ecosystems to thrive. The project also prioritizes reducing water use for landscape irrigation, implementing innovative and sustainable solutions to preserve this vital resource. Another key focus is the conservation of healthy soils, essential for ecosystem resilience and climate adaptation. By promoting the use of native plants and restoring native plant communities, Giardino Primaro helps maintain ecological balance and supports the natural heritage of the area. The initiative further addresses the urban heat island effect, introducing strategies to mitigate high temperatures in urban spaces and improve comfort for residents. Beyond environmental benefits, the project is designed to foster mental restoration, physical activity, and social connection, creating spaces that enhance well-being and community cohesion. Finally, Giardino Primaro is committed to raising sustainability awareness and education, engaging the public in a shared journey toward a greener, more inclusive future. These elements ensure that the project not only meets the rigorous standards of its environmental certification but also creates enduring benefits for both the community and the local environment.
The project strongly aligns with the values of the NEB and is supported by an ongoing environmental certification process (SITES), which guides every phase of Giardino Primaro. This certification framework ensures that the project delivers measurable impact through a series of carefully defined environmental and social parameters. Central to this approach is the conservation of habitats for threatened and endangered species, safeguarding urban biodiversity and creating conditions for ecosystems to thrive. The project also prioritizes reducing water use for landscape irrigation, implementing innovative and sustainable solutions to preserve this vital resource. Another key focus is the conservation of healthy soils, essential for ecosystem resilience and climate adaptation. By promoting the use of native plants and restoring native plant communities, Giardino Primaro helps maintain ecological balance and supports the natural heritage of the area. The initiative further addresses the urban heat island effect, introducing strategies to mitigate high temperatures in urban spaces and improve comfort for residents. Beyond environmental benefits, the project is designed to foster mental restoration, physical activity, and social connection, creating spaces that enhance well-being and community cohesion. Finally, Giardino Primaro is committed to raising sustainability awareness and education, engaging the public in a shared journey toward a greener, more inclusive future. These elements ensure that the project not only meets the rigorous standards of its environmental certification but also creates enduring benefits for both the community and the local environment.
Giardino Primaro uses design to make Argenta's hidden water geography legible again. Beauty here is not decorative: it emerges from revealing the place's memory and translating it into an everyday public experience. The project takes the vanished Po di Primaro riverbed as its formal and narrative guide. Paths, planting beds, edges and mobility lines follow sinuous river-like geometries, while the rain garden, dunes and riparian vegetation turn a technical hydrological device into a recognisable landscape image. The aesthetic experience is also cultural and pedagogical. The project creates a sequence of spaces for meeting, resting, playing, listening and performing, including the non-human parliament, open-ended play areas and storytelling devices connected to Argenta's environmental memory. Through the Play & Interplay approach, the garden becomes a place to inhabit actively rather than to cross passively: a civic landscape where children, families and other users can discover multiple uses and meanings. By reconnecting urban life with natural heritage, the project rebuilds a sense of belonging in a town whose historical image was deeply altered after second war wartime destruction and post-war reconstruction. The project aligns with a perspective of 'beauty as relational ecology', rooted in deep ecology and biophilia, where aesthetic quality emerges from the relationships between human and more-than-human actors rather than from formal composition alone.
Giardino Primaro is designed as an open and affordable public realm: free to access, easy to understand and usable by different ages and abilities. Inclusion is built into the project both socially and spatially. The intervention prioritises a place that already concentrates daily life - Argenta's main school area - and therefore directly benefits children, families, teachers and everyday users, while also improving conditions for the wider community. Universal design principles guide the layout, materials and location of services, ensuring continuity of paths, accessibility and the removal of architectural barriers. Traffic calming also makes the area safer for vulnerable users. The playground that will be set in the historical garden is designed using the Play & Interplay methodology (Play and Interplay - A manifesto for new design in Urban Recreational Environment, M. Paul Friedberg, Ellen Perry Berkeley. The Maxmillian Company Collier-Macmillian Ltd, London. 1970) that further expands inclusion by replacing the logic of isolated standard equipment with a whole play environment: interconnected, non-prescriptive and intergenerational. Natural materials, topographic variation, vegetation, hiding places, resting areas and sensory devices allow different forms of use, from play and exploration to pause, conversation and performance. Spaces such as the non-human parliament and the Kamishibai theatre strengthen this inclusive approach by enabling spontaneous storytelling, gathering and expression without requiring specialised equipment or paid access. Particular attention is given to vulnerable groups, including children, elderly people and individuals with reduced mobility, ensuring inclusive access and usability.
Giardino Primaro is not an isolated design exercise but the spatial outcome of a longer civic process. Its roots lie in the 2022 participatory pathway Percorso Primaro, which included urban explorations, public assemblies, a workshop and ritual walk with artist Leonardo Delogu, a co-design laboratory and a World Cafe. That process produced an open manifesto and identified via G. Matteotti as a pilot site for reconnecting Argenta with its water landscape. In the current design phase, participation continues through schools. The project is running 32 workshop appointments involving 150 students from 6 classes of 25. The activities combine shadow theatre in primary school and podcast production in upper school, helping students interpret Argenta's relation to water, climate risk and local memory. Students are therefore not only consulted; they become co-authors of narratives and public activation. Their outputs are intended to feed the communication of the project and its inauguration. After implementation, a collaborative gardeners group is planned to support long-term stewardship of the garden as a common good. This continuity - from participatory visioning, to educational co-creation, to shared care - gives citizens an active role in shaping, understanding and maintaining the place. Basso Profilo Impresa Sociale and its multidisciplinary team play a central role in this process, leading both the participatory pathways Percorso Primaro and Campotto: Verso un nuovo Piano di Stazione. These experiences consolidated an integrated approach between urban design, ecological systems and cultural practices, and directly informed the conception of Giardino Primaro, later entrusted to Basso Profilo within a temporary network of enterprises.
The project is backed by strong multi-level engagement. At institutional level, Giardino Primaro is promoted and co-funded by the Municipality of Argenta and the Emilia-Romagna Region, which secured the project's political and financial framework. At local level, the initiative builds on the 2022 participatory process and on ongoing collaboration with schools, teachers and students during the final design phase. These actors are not external consultees but operational stakeholders in the project's educational and communication dimension. The project also connects with a wider territorial strategy linking the city centre to the Po Delta Park and to the Valli di Argenta wetlands. In this framework, Giardino Primaro is in dialogue with LIFE FRESH, which is restoring the ecological conditions of around 170 hectares of freshwater habitats, and with PALUDICOLA, which explores swamp landscapes through art and artistic research. This network creates synergies between urban regeneration, biodiversity restoration, culture and civic activation. It also strengthens legacy: the renewed garden is expected to become a public interface where environmental projects, school activities, cultural programming and community events can meet, including through the planned inauguration within the Swamp Festival. [ADDED - GREEN] Basso Profilo Impresa Sociale acts as a bridging actor between municipality, schools, cultural institutions and environmental programmes, translating participatory processes into spatial strategies. This role is further expanded through the ongoing process of establishing a local unit of the regional Landscape Observatory network focused on the Padus Primarius (the paleo-riverbed of the Po). This initiative connects Giardino Primaro with the PALUDICOLA project (funded by the Italian Ministry of Culture and coordinated by Consorzio Wunderkammer), reinforcing a multi-level governance model where memory, ecology and civic engagement converge.
Giardino Primaro is grounded in a genuinely transdisciplinary process. At a multidisciplinary level, it combines landscape architecture, urban design, hydrology, ecology, arboriculture, mobility planning and accessibility design. These disciplines are integrated in one green-blue strategy where soil permeability, water management, planting, slow mobility and public-use devices are designed together rather than added sequentially. The project then moves beyond a purely technical interdisciplinary frame by incorporating participatory art, pedagogy, storytelling and communication. The 2022 Percorso Primaro process involved artist and performer Leonardo Delogu together with designers and civic actors; the open manifesto translated collective readings of Argenta into spatial priorities. The Play & Interplay materials further connect spatial design with child development, environmental learning and open-ended play. In the current phase, this transdisciplinary logic continues through school workshops based on shadow theatre and podcasting, and through narrative devices such as the non-human parliament, QR-linked contents and future communication infrastructure. The added value is a project that is technically robust, culturally legible and socially owned: one where experts, institutions, artists, teachers and students all contribute to the shaping of Giardino Primaro. Basso Profilo Impresa Sociale and its multidisciplinary team play a central role in this process, leading both the participatory pathways Percorso Primaro and Campotto: Verso un nuovo Piano di Stazione. These experiences consolidated an integrated approach between urban design, ecological systems and cultural practices, and directly informed the conception of Giardino Primaro, later entrusted to Basso Profilo within a temporary network of enterprises.
Giardino Primaro is innovative because it refuses the usual separation between public-space design, climate adaptation, play and cultural interpretation, building one integrated landscape infrastructure. It applies the Play & Interplay methodology to the public realm: rather than delivering a standard playground made of isolated objects, it creates a whole play environment: open-ended, interconnected, intergenerational. Play becomes a way to activate citizenship, learning and get ownership of space. The project treats the garden as a dynamic ecological system. Forest garden, rain garden and urban woodland work together with differentiated mowing, low-maintenance vegetation management and reuse of tree trunks where possible. This introduces adaptive, biodiversity-oriented practices unusual in urban centers. The project makes environmental memory part of the design. The hidden riverbed is translated into spatial form, archetypal totems, narrative devices, school workshops and digital communication tools. Technical infrastructure becomes cultural and pedagogical. The result is not just a greener street or park, but a new model of public space where ecological performance, beauty, participation and learning reinforce one another. This approach builds on previous applied research: Percorso Primaro and Campotto- Verso un nuovo Piano di Stazione. These projects function as real-life prototypes where ecological design, cultural activation and civic engagement were combined, making Giardino Primaro not an isolated innovation but a scalable evolution of already validated practices. The project challenges mainstream urban regeneration models based on sectoral interventions, proposing an integrated ecological and cultural infrastructure. The project positions itself as an alternative to conventional urban regeneration practices, typically separating ecological, social and spatial interventions, by proposing an integrated, process-based and landscape-driven model.
Three approaches shape Giardino Primaro. (1) Holistic green-blue approach: soil, water, vegetation, mobility, play and memory are treated as one. All actions are coordinated to improve environmental performance and everyday usability. (2) Participatory and multi-level process. The project grows out of the 2022 Percorso Primaro pathway and continues through school workshops, stakeholder dialogue and planned stewardship actions. Citizens contribute not only opinions, but narratives, uses and future care practices. (3) Universal design and open-ended use. It applies accessibility from the outset avoiding over-programmed spaces: paths, furniture, play devices are conceived for different bodies, ages and ways of inhabiting the site. The methodology is supported by executive design development, technical verification and environmental monitoring, making the project experientially rich and operationally grounded. The participatory pathways mentioned consolidated this integrated approach and directly informed Giardino Primaro. Other ongoing projects (e.g. PALUDICOLA, funded by the Italian Ministry of Culture) reinforces a multi-level governance model where memory, ecology and civic engagement converge. The project is rooted in a cultural-ecological framework that reads the Po di Primaro (Natura 2000 site) as a layered landscape system, where the current Reno river overlays historical geographies. This stratification informs Giardino Primaro as both anchor and legacy: a hybrid park inspired by deep ecology and biophilia, fostering a ‘community of desire’ capable of sustaining long-term relationships between citizens, urban space, wetlands and more-than-human actors. The methodology can be read as a clear process → prototype → implementation pipeline: participatory exploration generates shared knowledge; translated into pilot spatial prototypes; and finally consolidated into an implementable public infrastructure, ensuring continuity between vision, testing and construction.
Several elements of Giardino Primaro are transferable to other small and medium-sized municipalities. The first is the method: using a participatory process to read hidden territorial structures - such as a vanished riverbed, an abandoned edge or a forgotten commons - and translate them into a pilot public-space project. The second is the integrated green-blue toolkit: desealing, permeable paving, rain gardens, layered planting, differentiated mowing, reuse of on-site materials and traffic calming can be adapted to many urban contexts with limited space and strong climate pressures. A third transferable element is the Play & Interplay approach, which replaces standard playground logic with a civic and pedagogical landscape that supports multiple uses, intergenerational access and environmental learning. The project is also replicable in governance terms: it connects municipality, region, schools, cultural actors and environmental initiatives through a shared narrative and phased implementation. Finally, its communication model - combining storytelling, school outputs, on-site interpretation and future stewardship groups - can help other places turn technical regeneration works into collective, long-term cultural projects. The transferability of the project is strengthened by the fact that its methodology has already been prototyped by Basso Profilo Impresa Sociale through Percorso Primaro and Campotto: Verso un nuovo Piano di Stazione. These experiences demonstrate how participatory processes, ecological narratives and spatial interventions can be systematically connected and adapted to different territorial contexts, offering a replicable model for municipalities working at the intersection of urban regeneration and environmental transition.
Giardino Primaro is currently in the final executive design phase. Approval is expected by April 2026, construction is planned to start by June 2026 and completion is expected by September 2027. NEB values and principles are already embedded in the process. The design integrates sustainability through desealing, biodiversity, water retention and slower mobility; aesthetics through the re-interpretation of Argenta's water memory in spatial form; and togetherness through participation, accessibility and educational co-creation. Before works start, the current school programme will continue until June 2026 through 32 workshops involving 150 students from 6 classes, producing shadow-theatre and podcast outputs connected to the project narrative. During construction, communication and interpretation tools will accompany the transformation so that the site remains understandable and publicly shared. After completion, the next steps include inauguration and public activation of the garden, integration with wider territorial initiatives such as the Swamp Festival, and the launch of a collaborative gardeners group to support stewardship and long-term care. This phased plan demonstrates that Giardino Primaro is not only ready to be built, but also prepared to be socially inhabited and maintained according to NEB principles.
