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Subject: Studio Napoli Est
Date: 21 February 2022
Dear Student,
We are looking forward to meeting your energy,
curiosity, and learning thirst by diving together into the complex challenge of
reading, reinterpreting, and designing the peripheral areas of the dynamic and intricate
urban reality of Naples.
We will try to unfold issues and values of this
contemporary city, a term that implies multiple and intertwined layers made of tangible
and intangible elements: the historical city, the ecological city, the city of
marginalization, the city of built infrastructures and the city-landscape, the
city of risks and the city of social vitality. In this fragile equilibrium, we
think that the overall conditions of livability in the outskirts, and in interstitial
and waiting areas must be questioned.
With this awareness, we place the transformation processes
of transitional spaces at the core of our studio. This means dealing with
spaces that have the possibility of evolving into something else, feeding a new
ecology of the city. These spaces are areas that have completed their life
cycle and that are now wasted-lands, awaiting for new uses to be activated with
specific practices of care at multiple scales. They are liminal spaces, at the
threshold of the urban centre and rural areas, of water and land, of the city
of the rich and the city of the poor, the safe city and the city of hazards.
In this perspective, the metropolitan coast of Naples,
laying under the volcano Vesuvius, is a condenser of new opportunities that can
channel abandoned areas and waste flows into resources for the regeneration of
territories. With a focus on the eastern waterfront of the periphery of Naples,
the district of San Giovanni a Teduccio, we will tackle a wild assembly of
transitional spaces that emerged as the result of industrial dismissing and of
unrealized or incomplete urban plans.
The local difficulties in guiding change and the
significant disconnections in both development proposals and existing
fragmented zones – port areas, residual agriculture plots, dense residential
neighbourhoods, large infrastructures, archaeological sites, decadent
warehouses, and new educational hubs – are conditions yet to be solved and they
frame our starting point. How can design become a process of sensitive mending
for unsolved urban contexts? What elements must we look at to activate relations
and synergies? What are the systems of values, norms, and infrastructures that
shape the territory? How can the ecological turn intervene in such systems?
What tools, actors, and timeframes can guide attentive and effective
transformations?
During the studio, we will collectively try to answer
these questions while forging critical thinking and working in groups on
strategic proposals involving architecture, urban, and landscape design. We
will create a knowledge framework approaching the area through a combination of
technical and interpretative analyses. The identification of essential elements
of the culture of places – and its translation into visual languages – values subjective
perceptions that feed suggestive readings of the city. These build the foundations for positioning
yourselves as agents of the transformation. With the ambition to improve the quality
of life and design inclusive and sustainable transformations, we will define processes,
functions, forms and materials of possible future scenarios for Napoli Est.
We hope to meet you soon and be inspired by places, people
and atmospheres we will encounter together.
Sincerely,
Michelangelo
Russo, Marica Castigliano, Fabio Di Iorio, Maria Simioli (UNINA team)
Andreu
Arriola Madorell, Aurorarosa Alison, Ambra Benvenuto, Alessandro Cacioppo,
Francesca Garzilli (POLIMI team)