Starting from urban regeneration projects for a brownfield site in Turin, the paper aims to focus attention on the eco-symbolic mediation that lies between physical and metaphorical, material and immaterial aspects. These aspects, which always influence the architectural choices, take on particular importance in projects that involve existing buildings, which are more or less defined by their own identity, collective memory, and historical culture.

For this reason, the contribution intends to broaden the perspective towards the concept of urban landscape which seeks not only to account for the complexity that characterizes urban areas, but also to emphasize the intrinsic relationship established between a society and its environment, based on ‘lived experience’, that is on the emotions, the feelings, the memories, the imagery, and the expectations that a place, in preserving (or not) its current consistency, can evoke and represent.

As an expression of a “médiance”(A. Berque), the concept of landscape seems central to analyze the delicate relationship between design and memory, between material and emotional heritage, and to take into account the aesthetic and affective qualities that are not always tangibly present in the territory, but which nevertheless often define some of its salient and identifying characteristics.