Public Places in the Nature. The regeneration of urban form in the brownfield sites

The paper will deal with the theme of the re-foundation of form of the city and definition of new public spaces in the brownfield sites. It will do so through the description of two urban regeneration projects: the project for the city of Kotor and the project for the city of Cetinje, both in Montenegro. The choice of these two case studies has been dictated not only by their paradigmatic value in relation to the issues of the authors’s research but also by their concreteness in relation to the transformation processes in progress. In both cities, the project areas are currently occupied by industrial disused plants (a soap factory in Kotor and appliances and footwear factories in Cetinje). These areas have a strategic position in relation both to the cities to which they belong than to their territories. At the same time they have a vocation of “city gate” and are suitable to settle new urban centralities. For both areas an “open” settlement system is proposed, capable at the same time to establish a meaningful relationship with the consolidated city, its structuring and characterizing elements, and, above all, to involve the empty spaces of nature as new kind of public places defined by the relationship between its well recognizable urban units. The main goal of these two projects, as well as of the research that inspire them, is the definition of the settlement and morphological “grammars” that preside over the form of this new kind of urban public spaces, corresponding to the “open” and dilated condition of our suburbs as well as to our will to “accommodate” wide space of nature within our cities. At this aim the brownfield sites represent a resource for the regeneration of form and spaces of the contemporary city.