Cities, like organisms, are urban systems that grow inexorably and try to survive by counteracting the changes. The rising sea level caused by climatic alterations is set to change the face of Boston. The transformation took place in the last centuries, from wetland marsh in the impervious metropolis, has caused irreparable damage to the urban DNA that today in unprepared to deal with new environmental scenarios. As an organism that fits to the context in which it lives, Boston has the opportunity to modify its DNA by incrementally evolving to ever changing environment. The genetic recombination of the city is therefore essential to make it a new urban resilient system, able to live with water. A LEISURE PARK is grafted from the Emerald Necklace, elemental key of urban development in recent centuries. A dynamic and incremental reconnection, forms an unusual landscape system that genetically recombines existing inherited traits (coastal park and point of interest) with a natural and resilient infrastructure that colonize the coast of South Boston, generates new urban development scenarios. Performances and experiences merge in this connective ecosystem that synthesizes new habitats and recreational spaces allowing the city to enhance its cultural and social identity.


The neighborhood is a constitutive element of the landscape graft that redefines the urban development of the South of Boston. An evolutionary process of employment, an infiltration strategy that takes advantages of wet strings structuring as new urban matrices that track and regulate the new development. The green, as a backbone of the project, triggers a temporal process of urban plant. Leisure activities and public functions arise from strings such as flywheels for the further residential completion. Phyto-purification,permeable surfaces, sea level rise mitigation and managemente of the water-process, work in symbiosis with the activities of leisure and entertainment. The system’s ability to engage with water creates a dynamic and rich landscape with ever-changing scenarios.

Company Name
University of Ferrara, Department of Architecture (Italy)

Team Member(s)
Nicola Cataldo, Master’s Degree Architecture Student
Andrea Andreotti, Master’s Degree Architecture Student