GOCCIA is an innovative Interspecies Playground where environment becomes a stakeholder in the development of interspecies design thinking. It will recover an area contaminated by former industrial activities and spontaneously re-naturalized. Until 1994 and for the previous 85 years, the area, located in the NW part of Milan, was used to produce gas for urban services, causing very high levels of chemical contaminants in the soil. In the last 30 years it has become a wild urban woodland. Since 2000 CdM has developed studies and analysis for the area regeneration and it is
now designing a process of land reclamation. Nearby POLIMI Campus is expanding with the Master plan by Renzo Piano. GOCCIA involves a study of the plant-microorganism system of contaminant degradative processes, as spontaneous phytoremediation whose results will be used to design
new NBS. Indeed, differently from most phytoremediation projects, it starts from an existing spontaneous ecosystem, with an interspecies collaborative relation, structuring monitoring of biodiversity and environmental ecosystem services to develop innovative forest management and governance.
Expected results are:
a) accessibility to a new large green area for Milan citizens;
b) validation of a highly innovative reclamation process;
c) involvement of citizens in scientific processes;
d) consolidation of a quintuple-helix governance model, which includes the environment as a stakeholder;
e) development of interspecies design thinking.