The disappearance “of common spaces and of the practice to gather there, is decisive for understanding the ethical problems of our societies” (Zoja, 2007): this phenomenon affects many areas of our cities, where urban sprawl seems to create social unease. The ability to generate spaces where communities can recognize themselves, derives from the responsibility of the designer (as De Carlo said) to build a dialogue (Bruzzese, 2019). The attention to the people to meet their needs and the consideration about the interactions between context and project, embracing the transformations of this one by its users, are key elements to understand the identity features of a landscape and to imagine its potential. Some experiences of the last century, from the “factory of culture” by Adriano Olivetti in Ivrea, to the “Garden of the Meetings” by Giovanni Michelucci, suggest possible approaches to participatory planning in order to design quality identity places. The landscape design, especially, has to deal with the building of a sense of belonging by the inhabitants of a place, managing to adapt to the involved mutable and unplanned needs, while keeping its coherence with the context. Accepting the mutable and dialogical nature of the design, allows us to understand the value of active participation of the population in achieving a territorial identity –community + landscape – as a tool for social and environmental resilience.