Taranto from the post-war period to the ‘big industry’. For a history of the urban morphology and settlement process

In this analysis of the urban morphology of the city of Taranto we intend to outline the development of the city from the second post-war period to the crisis of industrial production in the eighties. The failure of the large metalworking industry linked to naval and war production has sanctioned a period of deep crisis for the Ionian city starting from the postwar period. From this moment the process of evolution of the city and the definition of the morphology of the new neighborhoods seems to take place in the absence of a credible urban development project. As in the years of fascism, the reactivation of a mechanism of development passes through decisions and plans that go back to national strategies from the local dimension. At the end of the fifties, Italsider established a new basic industry in the city. The city is involved in a state intervention that promises new spaces for economic and social expansion that require a more structured urban settlement process. The phenomenon leads the urban growth of the city to a sudden acceleration that does not stop until at least the seventies and goes beyond the established urban development guidelines involving the areas north of the city. But the renovatio urbis is not only concerned with the expansion areas, but also places the recovery of the old city started during the fascism and interrupted with the start of the world war. At the same time, the new districts are born under the banner of new urbanistic trends and see the involvement of authoritative designers such as Luigi Piccinato, asked to define the new directional district of the city, the studio Nizzoli Associati that deals with some buildings inside the the new industrial complex of Italsider and, finally, Giò Ponti, who is called to cancel “the cultural infamy” (G. C. Argan) of the process of establishing the new Taranto with the project of the concathedral in 1971. The purpose of this research is to make these events, so far documented in a non-homogeneous and fragmented way, as internal to an urban history of the city and connected to the role that architecture as a whole has played in the development of the Taranto area, within the physical limits of the two seas, its projects and its utopias.