The evolution of urban gardens in Puglia into a revolutionary multifunctional context.

Up to the first half of the previous century, the urban vegetable gardens (UVG) were the first source of vege-tables for Puglia's local populations, due to higher avail-ability of agricultural resources near to urban areas and to the advantage of being close to the work place for farmers and their families and other labour units. Never-theless, in the last decades UVG have been progressively replaced by urban buildings for industrial and residential use and by infrastructure artefacts, while vegetables have become widespread crops in the region. However, the risk of seeing disappear a great number of tradition-al agro-biodiversity and agricultural techniques is too high. The regional project “Biodiversity of vegetable crops of Puglia (Biodiverso)” works in this direction: to search for, to collect and to recover old genetic material, traditional vegetable practises and lost knowledge. This project also has a revolutionary approach that is based on a participatory method engaging the community, appropriately using the social network. The result has been the creation of a network of people, associations, social projects connected through and thank to the activi-ty of Biodiverso. Among these realities, a case study has been considered, where an ancient UVG has been recov-ered assuming new perspectives and functions, aiming at enhancing the integration of the UVG in the urbanised society.