Vegetazione aliena. Osservare il cambiamento climatico attraverso nuove forme di natura urbana.

It is no longer possible (or almost impossible) for us to find forms of vegetation in our cities that respond to functional and expressive codes that are such and reassuring (because we know them). We no longer know how vegetation inhabits and lives in our cities; it has slipped out of our hands and out of our minds. For it has now settled far beyond Gilles Clemént's Third Landscape (Clemént, 2005), it is beyond the new wild urban ecosystem that constitutes the Fourth Nature theorised by Ingo Kowarik (Kowarik, 1992 et 2011), and it is also arguably different from what we have recently called the Wild City (Metta and Olivetti, 2019). We are in the age of alien vegetation, wild, exotic, urban and the result of climate change. It surprised us with a grand debut in the silent, long months of the pandemic while we were forced indoors. It is now part of our cities and we can no longer ignore it for the common good of those who inhabit them. To tell the story of it requires the effort of a narrative that is not easy, that can only be done with an unprecedented lexicon after an effort of semantic reading, and that must be guided by an openness to welcome something that has decisively occupied our cities without us ever having asked for it, or at least not having foreseen it with such intensity.