Project for a non-exploitative architecture.Urban biodiversity in the ruins of the former cement plant in Prato

In a context that tends more and more towards total urbanisation, despite the effects of climate change becoming increasingly violent and evident, land consumption and building exploitation do not seem to be able to stop. We therefore wanted to focus on those territories that seem to have emerged from the logic of capital to become other situations. Places where biodiversity begins to resettle by converting highly degraded industrial and urban territories. These spaces are often perceived by the population as highly degraded and abandoned, to be eliminated or reconverted. However, these areas can become sort of open-air cultural laboratories, in which to immerse oneself in this rediscovered urban naturalness reactivating that relationship between man and nature that had been lost in the last century. The context in which we operate for this project is the city of Prato. Specifically, the project takes place within the former Marchino cement factory, one of the most important artefacts of local industrial archaeology. The choice of this site is an openly provocative act, as it is the object of yet another phenomenon of building exploitation qualified, once again, as an urban requalification intervention. The work is carried out through strategies that set in motion simple processes of attention, care, reuse and recycling, towards a dynamic and open result. Gentle rather than strong decisions are favoured, allowing for adaptations, verifications, clarifications over time and even rethinking; hence the insertion of light/ temporary structures that on the one hand consolidate by making the cement plant spaces usable again, and on the other hand generate new ones. Through these interventions, we want to protect the function of the area as a refuge for diversity, as well as its important ecosystem value, which must not be sold off in the name of profit.