Perspectives of resilience for the abandoned industrial areas

Desolated scenarios of new ruins caused by the disposal of industrial areas, no longer efficient to the needs of the actual production, dominate the landscape of the postmodern city. Realizing its relevant recurrence in the history of capitalism, David Harvey observed how any political, social or economic crisis might be converted into a significant opportunity to promise an unprecedent moment for the human progress. The question to deal with is whether, with a specific crisis as the urban one, the evoked progress can be achieved with the compulsive expansion or with the restoration of what has already been done (and built). Within the contemporary condition, the way to prefigure the resilience of the large industrial suburbs can only depend on a posture that refuses to look at them as “a uniform and unchangeable system”, to support perspectives of modification. Aware of the risk entailed by any form of reduction, those perspectives can be summarized in the following categories, recalling the path that all the contexts involved in what is commonly named “industrial renaissance” should consider: encouraging phenomena of industrial continuity, by investing on the factories still operating, reorganizing the precarious ones and reconsidering the related production chains; or, alternatively, opening to new prospects of growth and encouraging the architectural recovery of the components bound to a more intense degradation. In particular, as Giuseppe Soriero argues, the identification of different solutions of development can act in anticonjunctural terms and trigger effects of long term, strengthening the abandoned areas and redeeming their social dimension. In the latter alternative it might be discovered the greatest opportunities to build the foundations of a new story. Acquiring a case study from the palimpsest of the contemporary city, paradigmatic for its complexity, it is identified the possibility of revealing the potential of urban planning and architectural reasoning in restoring the identity of territories deprived of the capacity to assume any functional role in contemporary urban metabolism. The Area of Industrial Development of Bari-Modugno, studied in depth through the instrument of the analytical observation and critical re-drawing, will represent the necessary basis for measuring interventions that will assume, in an ascending climax, first the architectural scale of the building and then the settlement one. Although coming from a perspective that could be considered tainted by an excessive utopianism, the same interventions, eventually, will include the tangible nature of the problems that afflict a defaced territory, aspiring to its environmental protection and sustainability. Besides, as Lewis Mumford wrote in 1921, recalling Oscar Wilde, “a map of the world that does not contain the country of Utopia is not even worthy of a glance”, demonstrating how the utopia, if not confused with an illusory escape, imposes a critical confrontation with the questions arisen to who know how to observe the complex condition of the present time.

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  • English

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  • Accession Number: 01834784
  • Record Type: Publication
  • Files: TRIS
  • Created Date: Jan 28 2022 9:15AM