RECONSTRUCTION OF THE HISTORIC IMAGE OF AN URBAN GARDEN AS A TOOL FOR PRESERVATION AND ENHANCEMENT

In the last century towns and green areas in urban context have substantially changed at landscape and architectonic level. Several gardens have today an historic value, but in many cases their current arrangement is highly different from the original one. With the aim of preserving and enhancing such gardens, it results particularly useful to define analytic tools for the knowledge of the original features of those places and for a comparison to the current ones, with particular consideration of plant and morphological features. The goal of the study is the definition of an operative method of analysis suitable to reconstruct the historic image of urban green areas with particular reference to the plant arrangement, the architectonic composition and the morphology. The method defined was applied to a study case represented by an urban garden in Imola (Italy), designed and built at the end of the 19th century and deeply changed so far. The historic image of the area was reconstructed, based on documental data obtained through the analysis of the original project documents and their digitalization by CAD, and was compared to the current state, analyzed by means of a three-dimensional digital topographic survey. The results allowed outlining the transformations undergone to the area, and in particular to identify the original elements most significant at plant, composition and morphological level. The performed analyses represent a tool adoptable to support design choices for the preservation and enhancement of urban historic gardens.