The present work focuses on European cities’ environments and open spaces, aiming to demonstrate how, through landscape architecture, it is possible to respond effectively to many of the ecological and social hardships that the Green Deal aspires to alleviate. It was signed in 2019 by all of the member countries of the Union, seeks to reverse the climate change trend by establishing a series of goals for improving environmental and economic quality for 2030 and 2050 and also aims to enact social justice in rural areas and in the urban environment. Landscape architecture, which is the art of combining the physical and immaterial elements in cities’ open spaces, is taken in this work as the method of interpreting the existing environment. The description, together with the narrative analysis of five selected site-specific urban renovations projects carried out in the last 15 years by some of the main contemporary landscape architects, such as Micheal Desvigne, Peter Latz and Gilles Clément, demonstrates, by means of their empirical experiences, the benefits of the landscape design. It is able to match both the ecological need expressed in the Deal and to respond to the ambition of an open and rightful city, as called for by the theories of Sennet and Balmori. In order to reach the just transition and to leave no one behind, and to meet and to implement the Green Deal objectives, the new, positive and long-lasting explained transformations require the consideration of landscape design, in all its material and immaterial components, as a theoretical synthesis capable of obtaining a practical application in fighting climate change, and it should be considered and included in city management policies and in the Deal, too.

The aim of this paper is to reflect on the nature of the forest as a super-diverse open space capable of welcoming forms of community life usually reserved for cities. In fact, the forest can no longer be considered as misplaced in the urban environment, but rather as an integral part of its identity. The real purpose of this landscape, where many people live, will be explored, taking into account all those experiences in which it is the forest that opens up to the city and not vice versa. To this end, the privileged spaces for research will be civil forests (Olivetti, 2023); they are an active part of the relationships that take place in the urban environment and not at its service. There are places where the process of including the city in the forest is taking place. Even if these spaces have di!erent geographies and dimensions, it is the fact that they are outside the codified rules of use for exclusively anthropogenic environments that makes them unusual, valuable and fully functional.

Palermo is a lot of landscapes. It is a geography of exaggerated places able to generate a condition of constant wonder in those who cross it. The many souls of different peoples who have inhabited it and who still inhabit it constitute a mosaic made of very close and uncovered relationships between plants, animals, men, sea and light. This contribution aims to explore - not in an exhaustive way - some conditions of coexistence that have been observed within the open spaces of the city (in particular of its Kalsa district). They are interesting because show us how spontaneous links between different species and objects (mostly ruins of the Second World War) constitute places of unprecedented beauty and social cohesion functioning in complex urban tis- sues. In front of this evidence there is the need to establish new interpretative categories of the existing, in order to generate a taxonomy. It could identify the possible active roles that the relationships and coexistences already acting can have within the project of the city (turning them into gardens, for example) and which ones should be defused because they are harmful to the inhabitants and to nature

Water in Palermo holds the city in check; it is its main front to the East being the sea. It closes its expansion towards the West with the rivers, streams and springs that flow from the Panormitani mountains. The constant presence of the wind keeps it free of fog, but it cannot dampen the dense and incessant presence of water in the air in the form of humidity. Over the centuries, those who have inhabited the city have had to come to terms with this anwieldy presence, which has been a source of joy in shaping the Conca d'Oro. It is as incredibly fertile today as it was then, and of despair at the flooding of the Kemonia and the marshy stagnation in the Mondello area. The continuous negotiation (which shows no sign of dying out) with water has determined ways of inhabiting the city and induced behaviours within the urban space that are decisive for the quality of life in Palermo. They are much more resilient than the illicit and erroneous management of these forms of water that has taken place over the last 70 years. The cases of the districts of Danisinni and Villagrazia represent some examples from which it is possible to draw strategies and useful elements for the design of urban scenarios in cities in which water has many different forms, from the most evident to the most hidden.