Sustainable rehabilitation of neglected and marginal landscapes: the San Lorenzo valley in Sardinia

This paper describes a proposal for the sustainable rehabilitation of a neglected and marginal fluvial landscape. It situates the experience into a broader debate about sustainability and spatial design, and then draws from it some general conclusion. The study subject is a fluvial valley characterised by thirty-six mills, which once served the agriculture of the surroundings. The decline of water as power source let to the decline of the valley. The mills became eventually farms, houses, or were left empty. The proposal envisions multiple forms of interaction with the different contextual issues related to the context, turning the design of the water course in a way to cope with erosion and floods, to produce clean energy, and finally as attractor for tourism. The result is a series of integrated actions that offers new opportunities to the community, designing a new sustainable landscape drawing from the specific natural and historical aspects of the site. Every action is linked with one of the anthropic and natural factors that characterise the valley, or that can be beneficially introduced, so that the proposal can be further adjusted in accordance with the relative importance of each factor over time.