Open Design Practices and New Challenges for the Adaptive City

This essay focuses aspects related to the project "Mediterranean Urban Campus", an experience conducted at the Italian Pavillion of Dubai Expo 2020. The text addresses two central dimensions for the metadesign of adaptive urban open spaces. The first dimension is related to the challenge of a cross/inter/trans-disciplinary translation of design, overcoming the recurring definition that reduces the comparison between different disciplines to a simple aggregation of heterogeneities. The second dimension is related to the methodological aspects toward the continuous changes of the bio-tecno-socio-sphere that must be interpreted not as limits, but as opportunities for a plural and multi-informational guidance of metadesign, in order to raise integrated natural, individual, organisational and spatial adaptive capacities.