Density, Regeneration and the Need for New Spaces

In cities and metropolitan areas, marginal and degradation conditions can be found everywhere, even in the most central spaces. In fact, the concept of periphery based on the distance from the center seems outdated, associating the term with the deprivation of rights, like the “right to the city” and the opportunities it offers. Moreover, nowadays taking care of the existing city seems to be an unavoidable necessity to restore quality, accessibility and safety completely neglected in decades of development; this need becomes even more urgent when events like those experienced in past years require to rethink ways and spaces of living together. Lastly, we can consider that the place-based approach for the transformation of “internal areas” can be related to an inter-urban scale to strengthen social cohesion and promote local development even in interstices and marginal areas inside the city. From these reflections, among the urban environments to be rethought, here we suggest to deepen the theme of the historical peripheries, in which there are typical and peculiar conditions that make them paradigmatic of a contemporary condition, complementary to the dispersion and loss of urban form: high degradation of the building stock, which has reached obsolescence in many parts, combined to the persistence of historical and environmental values; high density corresponding a chronic underdevelopment of services and collective spaces; a social unease caused by a combination of poverty conditions, subculture non-integration of immigrant communities; all situations in which the “right to the city” seems to be denied. Today, in a problematic condition where the theme of distancing raises new questions about density as a value, the theme of inner peripheries, as symptomatic of the city unease as its complementary phenomenon of urban sprawl, requires a specific, place-based approach, attentive to material and immaterial characters, as well as the urban form and living conditions.