From the garden to the city. Considerations on adaptive approaches to contemporaneity

Contemporary urban regeneration increasingly converges on open spaces as strategic devices for addressing social, environmental, and spatial fragmentation produced by post-war urban development. Within this framework, public space is no longer a residual outcome of built form but a primary infrastructure for cohesion, well-being, and ecological transition. This paper investigates the relevance of the garden as a typological and conceptual reference within current regeneration practices, questioning whether it can still operate as an effective tool under contemporary conditions. Traditionally defined as an enclosed, controlled, and symbolically charged space, the garden has progressively lost its clear identity, becoming a generic category that absorbs diverse forms of vegetated open space. This semantic and material dilution, however, coincides with its increasing centrality in regeneration policies, due to the availability and adaptability of unbuilt public land. The paper argues that rather than dismissing the garden as an obsolete model, its structural traits—modularity, limits, representational value, and relational scale—can be reinterpreted within adaptive, process-based approaches. Through the lens of urban acupuncture and multi-scalar regeneration strategies, the study focuses on pocket gardens as an emblematic case. Emerging from residual and marginal spaces, pocket gardens operate as minimal modules capable of activating social practices, fostering bottom-up processes, and constructing networks of public space. Their morphology, accessibility, and everyday use reflect a shift from symbolic enclosure to open-ended urban devices. The paper concludes that the garden, reframed as a flexible and evolutionary system rather than a fixed typology, can still play a critical role in contemporary urban regeneration, mediating between heritage, landscape, and adaptive urban design.