Towards a New European Landscape: Countryside as Inhabited Ecosystem Model

The New European Bauhaus doesn't propose just a new way of interpreting health and welfare into a new sustainable productive paradigm but may well determine a deep re-establishment of our way of conceiving and inhabiting the European area. All along the Twentieth Century, cities have been the greatest human aspiration places but also consumption models of natural resources until the degree of "being human on earth" [1] reached a critical point. Meanwhile countryside has been "forgotten" although it is the place where human knowledge grows certainly more than in the cities [2]. The new Bauhaus deal, over the very pandemic period, has enabled to reflect on the manifold continental crises consequences but has also increased that human space re-establishing role of "design" starting from models radically different from the past. To this effect, the paper proposes two perspectives: Tracing into the multiple forms of historical European countryside-from the "inhabited" one [3] of the major continental plains to peripheral polyculture areas, from Mediterranean gardens and agricultural cities to multifunctional farmhouses-some paradigms which capture these new deep-changing energies. Interpreting European countryside as a "coevolution" field with cities and as a theatre of techno-ecological development enables to reformulate the human combination of producing/inhabiting into SDGs. Both perspectives will be illustrated through some modern and contemporary projects which were outstanding for their innovation with the aim of constructing a first state of art of countryside design into a new sustainable continental landscape vision.