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risk and certainty. Permanent projects tend to be founded on prediction. They will last, so they need precise configuration not just of aesthetic design, but also of how they will work, the activities which will be allowed and an anticipation of the accidents that could happen. This approach implies a denial of the unexpected and incidental and the opportunity connected with risk. It builds on the dangerous and not the inventive side of unknown situations. All has to be well known in advance. Actions such as VAP, on the contrary, show the benefit of design as a form of negotiation: negotiation among places, natural elements, and people, instead of design as imposition. They ask to think about how to respond to, support, and follow people and places instead of how to control them. They ask how to welcome and not reject unpredictable events, because life itself is dynamic and changeable. Landscape could be a good paradigm from which to learn. As Gilles Clément writes: ‘Ethnologists, botanists...even sociologists… work with the flowing data of the living world. They are never allowed to describe a situation as stable or permanent. If we take
into account...the philosophy deriving from this, we would imagine planning in a quite different manner. Instead of stiffening the framework of the garden or public spaces, we would imagine those flexible and deep, capable of absorbing the transformation of the living world’.7 Public/Common Most of the public spaces we have learned to deal with in our cities are a creation of modern urban culture. We have to go back to the eighteenth century, when major cities in Europe provided citizens with spaces for open-air social life. Not only public gardens and public parks, but also allées, boulevards, and cours, were added to the historical streets and squares.8 It is not a coincidence that it was the same period of our history when fights for a welfare government, social equity, and justice started to achieve impressive results. In our urban tradition, public spaces have been a great achievement of societies confident of their cultural, political, and ethical values. The public spaces have always been a symbol of the maturity and health of our civil society. But in recent years we have been witnessing a