From Barracks to Campus: The Innovation Park as a Paradigm for the City of Bari

The design of military settlements evolves by pursuing a tenet of absolute autonomy and seclusion from the cities where they actually stay. Their transformations often occur entirely indifferent to the changes within the city, adhering instead to internal military logic. Following the demilitarization process of these fragments in the city, the strength pursued by these enclaves to detach from urban dynamics emerges, delineating areas where values, exchanges, and uses remain suspended in a timeless and spaceless condition. In this suspension, the city has grown and transformed in its forms and characteristics, arranging itself near these impenetrable perimeters with the same indifference exhibited by the military settlements. This description applies to the site of the former Magrone Barracks in Bari, where a desirable process of reintegrating this fragment into the urban dimension has recently begun. The project for an Innovation Park aligns with the logic of the city, constituting an autonomous part of the city, a "piece" of the city, a city within the city. It addresses the construction of a new campus capable of establishing itself as a paradigm of a new urban form. It inherits the built legacy of the military heritage, evaluating its potential to contribute to the project of a new part of the city. As a small city within or beside the city of Bari that hosts it, the university campus emerges as an architectural type capable of relating both to the urban dimension and the metropolitan landscape structured structured by the polycentric systems of relations of mobility infrastructures. The design concept for the Innovation Park, as developed by the Politecnico di Bari after a collaborative process with various public entities (Apulia Region, the Agency for the Right to University Studies of the Apulia Region, the Municipality of Bari and the State Property Agency), entails completing and integrating the grid of large linear buildings of the former Magrone Barracks to forge a new relationship between the "parts", where free natural spaces are no longer "outside" but within the city, generating a renewed urban section. The design of shared spaces for knowledge, marked by flexibility in uses and spatial configurations, responds to the need to establish a new campus that combines formal and educational purposes.