Inhabiting the quarry. Strategies for recovery. Projects for Cutrofiano

The research adopts an interdisciplinary approach to the recovery and adaptive reuse of extractive landscapes, with a specific focus on the quarry system of Cutrofiano, in the Salento area (Southern Italy). The work operates within a theoretical and operational framework that interweaves architecture, geology, ecology, and anthropology, aiming to define strategies and tools for the sustainable transformation of disused quarry sites into ecological, cultural, and energy infrastructures. The thesis is based on the assumption that the quarry represents a radical form of landscape, where the matter of the earth and the form of the project meet, offering a reflection on contemporary ways of inhabiting the world. The research reconstructs a critical framework on the meaning of the “quarry landscape,” where nature and artifice, economy and morphology overlap. Through the phenomenology of space, the quarry is interpreted as a form of knowledge, an archive of relations, and a generative device. It constitutes the negative of the city and its ontological counterpart, in a reciprocity that unites the constructive and geological dimensions of the territory. The thesis defines an interdisciplinary method of interpretation. The multicriteria analysis developed for the case of Cutrofiano made it possible to identify areas of vulnerability and potential transformation, assessing the stability of the quarry fronts, the environmental characteristics, and the prospects for accessibility and reuse. The methodology, conceived as an open and transferable matrix, proposes a replicable model applicable to other Mediterranean contexts characterized by similar morphological and socio-economic conditions. On the operational level, the research materializes in the regeneration project articulated into three complementary strategies: the transformation of the quarry into a flood-control basin, conceived as an instrument for risk mitigation and sustainable water management; the conversion of the quarry floor into an energy park; and the design of cultural spaces intended for collective use and for the enhancement of the territory’s identity and heritage.