This paper aims to describe the design strategy adopted in Rome to support and enhance sustainable mobility. It is a strategy aimed at promoting new green infrastructures for urban accessibility, daily sports practice and social inclusion in a historic city, stratified and not very inclined to change. Therefore, the dissemination of this experience is useful for planning a sustainable future for heritage cities that ensures an appropriate and equitable balance between conservation and development. Sustainable mobility is now considered one of the most important challenges for metropolitan areas and large conurbations. In these terms, Rome is a weak city. The city’s great bicycle ring route (GRAB), an integral part of the Extraordinary Tourism Mobility Plan 2017-22, is a key infrastructure for increasing more sustainable and healthier modes of travel, even on a local scale. The GRAB project, whose complex infrastructure provides multiple services, differs from a simple cycle path network. Its complexity refers to an ability to attract different types of users in different types of urban contexts—historical settings, monuments, newer neighborhoods and areas of contemporary urbanization. The project results can be measured first in relation to its progress (already funded, in the executive planning phase, with the approval of the first construction sites expected by 2022). A second important result is the participation of institutional bodies and citizens’ associations, which will oversee the construction and maintenance work as well as infuse into the project a constant vitality, in a true civic ecology perspective. Third, the results are important for enhancing metropolitan area accessibility and the environmental and social re-activation of the areas crossed, achieved directly and through the project’s realization. The GRAB strategy belongs to the new generation of landscape projects that have radically changed the priorities and hierarchies of intervention in the contexts of contemporary urbanization. These projects are based on the ecological analysis of the context but are located close to the fluctuating dynamics of contemporary metropolises and the problems of exclusion and marginality—both spatial and social—linked to the very rapid ecological, economic and demographic transformations.

The term co-evolution forces us to reflect on the transformation of the meaning of some terms, linked to the profound changes of our time and very relevant for the design disciplines.Starting from the role that some relational models have had within the landscape project up to the uncertain relationships that the project maintains with contemporary landscapes, this essay deals with dynamic interweaving of lines and nodes in continuous evolution, as suggested from Tim Ingold's metaphor.The new landscapes require new interpretative references connected to the change in meaning of three main and constitutive terms of modern thought: nature, earth, evolution.The great separation between 'nature and culture', which shows a disturbing permanence in our disciplinary field, has been outlined in the belief that it represents a serious obstacle to the start up of new explorations and imaginations.Some hints on the Gaia Hypothesis follow, images of “forces in action” regulated by principles of reciprocity that has managed to defeat the idea of ​​the planet as a sink, or a container. An idea that is rooted in modern thought, and which has made the boundaries between humans and non-humans increasingly blurred.With respect to the themes of evolution, I mentioned the need to contrast the imaginary of Darwinian origin,-based on natural selection (harden over the last century without any responsibility of the great biologist!), in favor of collateral forms of change, creative strategies of survival that slip away the classical gradualism of evolution theories, synthetically recalling Gould's research.In the second part of this editorial, I traced a possible interpretative geography of the contributions hosted in the issue, a map that overall appears very interesting for what it shows, and for what it hides. It is divided into 4 sections called: garden laboratories, resistances, dynamisms, reconciliations.Finally, I have highlighted some key terms from the texts by Laura Boella and Kristina Hill that can be useful for drawing new maps, orienting our design explorations.

The project SISMI-Tecnologie per il miglioramento della Sicurezza e la ricostruzione dei centri Storici in area sisMIca (technologies for the improvement of safety and the reconstruction of historic centres in the seismic area)–aims to provide tools and methods for risk reduction and seismic improvement of Lazio’s cultural assets and centres, causing research, intervention policies, and planning to interact in order to support reconstruction choices and foster dialogue with local parties and enterprises. One of the SISMI project’s main elements of innovation consists of preparing modes of integration of knowledge and assessments relating to the various components of a territory’s vulnerability and seismic hazard that can be used in other seismic territories. SISMI project, tested in seismic territories of Central Italy, is a methodology of integrated, multidimensional, and transdisciplinary investigation, in the conviction that the safety of the territory and of historic and cultural assets is the result of a dynamic risk reduction process capable of guaranteeing and promoting the local communities’ resilience, in which both physical/structural and sociocultural elements collaborate.