Learning to live better, through models of living linked to sustainable development, is to imagine our future between awareness of consumption and optimisation of resources. Up to now, economic motivations have steered technological innovation towards a reduction in the amount of matter and energy used for the production of object units, not considering that this is not favourable from an environmental point of view when considering the increase in overall consumption and the related production of waste. Determining design visions through new models, even if tracing difficult and treacherous paths, leads to proposals for useful and culturally acceptable solutions. Reduce, reuse, recover, recycle are goals to be achieved after sorting products and recycling them several times until their characteristics are no longer suitable for reuse.
In this framework, the role of the Municipal Collection Centre is a possible innovative response, both on a technical and socio-cultural level; a scenario of sustainability, in the contemporary city, within which appropriate and practicable strategies of urban action are defined. The spaces born from an overall vision will connect the design logic of a product (waste) and a service (collection) with those of the environment in which citizens live (territory and society). The waste object is taken out of its traditional context and elevated once again to the podium of production, it acquires a new value, it becomes a commodity again. For these reasons, the main aim of the project for the new waste collection centre in Castione della Presolana is to ensure that its use becomes part of citizens’ habits, with the same mechanism used when we go to the supermarket to buy what we need to consume.
The new Waste Collection Centre in Gagliano del Capo thus stems from the desire to go beyond the still all too common model of the lay-by, consisting of huge, smelly yards cluttered with haphazardly arranged bins, closed by an anonymous ring, to propose a new model, a plastic representation of a new way of life.
It is a place designed to be pleasant, safe, easy to use by both citizens and managers: shapes and materials are designed to fit in harmoniously with the context, to be pleasant but also easy to maintain and clean, where it is possible to bring children to show what is the correct ecological behaviour.
The space is designed to receive and support employment programmes of social importance: disassembly workshops, clothing or book collection centres, second-hand shops; a space that in the short term increases the amount of recycled materials and in the long term becomes an important point in the territory for the birth of a new micro-entrepreneurship in the field of recycling. A place where the ‘waste object’ is taken out of its traditional context and acquires a new value, becomes merchandise again.
We wanted to imagine the near future of Gagliano del Capo, which is no longer limited to complying with recycling standards, but which goes beyond, becoming a model to be followed, generating a virtuous motion and allowing, with the passage of time, people to learn to live better.
The intervention is located in the urban periphery, within an industrial and artisan area, very visible from the main road and located at the beginning of the town centre. The new waste collection centre wants to be permeable to the view, both of pedestrians travelling along the cycle/pedestrian path, and of vehicles travelling on the provincial road, so as not to obstruct the virtual optical cone between two large green areas, divided by the road axis. It wants to show itself off as an ideal entrance to the gates of the territory of the municipality of Gagliano del Capo, but at the same time it wants to conceal some less pleasant and more critical views from the main optical cones. With its architectural conformation and its peculiarities, it also wants to be a stimulus for the redevelopment and regeneration of the craft-industrial building of the context in which it is located.
