The outline of a post-suburban debate in Italy

2011

Starting from the early years of the 90's of the last century, the city has been placed at the centre of attention of European community and national politics and of the most recent theories of urban development, inspired by the theme of upgrading and of the new centrality of the historic part of the city, or rather its "historical centre". In these years not only interesting processes of rebuilding and of upgrading of historic areas have been implemented, but also experimental ways and new practices of intervention on the city itself, of unpublished contents, have contributed to the re-examination of the unusual procedures, of a reading of the city and of the territory based on two key themes: the functional organization and the necessity to satisfy the increasingly growing needs of the housing.

New Metropolitan Perspectives NMP 2020. Smart Innovation, Systems and Technologies., 2021

At a time when the seek for a broader understanding of contemporary suburbs is finding a reasonable global consideration, a specific attention to the suburbanisms, i.e. suburban ways of living, is still a slightly unexplored issue in the governance agenda. Despite the significance of insightful researches, studies and theories of Italian urbanization, Italian suburbs look wedged between urban and rural agendas, without finding a reasonable framework on which to build further strategies aimed at tackling the increasing socio-spatial inequalities that are unevenly shaping Italian in-between urban edges. According to these viewpoints, the paper employs a theoretical discussion of the marginal condition experienced by Italian suburbs, framing such marginality in few steps. First, the paper runs into the complexities of "suburban Italy" in a post-suburban framework. Second, moving from these first insights, the existence of Italian suburbs is questioned in analytical terms. Third, the paper set out the conditions from which to observe the lack of strategies for the Italian urban edges, entrenched between rural and urban agenda. To conclude, a body of final remarks for further studies is introduced towards an operational setting of suburban studies with reference to Italy.

Arquitectura y paisaje: transferencias histórica, retos contemporaneos, 2022

The 1950s saw the development of a new perception of urban settings and reflection on the concept of townscape and the sense of the aesthetics of buildings. The idea shared, among others, by the Neapolitans Domenico Andriello and Carlo Cocchia, is that the urban landscape is the bearer of harmony and “beauty” in cities. This is also reflected in the design of the new working-class neighbourhoods, to the extent that the intention to avoid conformity by giving identity to places made the first suburbs distinguishable. Therefore, it is significant and relevant to recognise in the urban landscape the historical and cultural values sedimented in the collective conscience, as happens in the two cases examined: the neighbourhood of Agnano in Naples by Stefania Filo Speziale and that of Spine Bianche in Matera, where some of the best professionals of those years worked, such as Mario Fiorentino and Hilda Selem, Michele Valori and Federico Gorio.

Land Use Policy, 2017

The research presented in this paper has analyzed 50 years of urban evolution in Italy and noted a considerable difference of geographic patterns of settlement growth compared to other countries of the World. The model of sprawl, recognized as international standard and a territorial disease, largely concerns the industrialized countries, but also developing countries, and in particular the entire European area, but distribution patterns in southern Europe, especially in countries in the Iberian, Mediterranean and Balkan areas, are significantly different from those found in northern Europe and other continents. Our study has investigated and diagnosed the forms of urban growth focusing on the Italian model, one of the most significant in Western Europe and for which we propose an alternative definition (urban sprinkling). It is important to highlight that the damage caused on the landscape, environment and communities by urban sprinkling is much more serious and irreversible than what notoriously caused by urban sprawl. Furthermore, there has been a drastic change in numerous rural, mountain and coastal landscapes, which today are profoundly different from those historically appreciated by culture and international tourism. The settlement configuration called "sprinkling" introduces the difficult methodological and planning aspects of its retrofit (de-sprinkling), a true challenge for land management, arguing that the even partial inversion of many negative effects is basically impossible in the short term; whereas, in a medium-long term, organized and politically coordinated programmes can tackle the various issues.

The increasingly fast pace in urban conversion of land over the past 50 years in Italy is a phenomenon that is still difficult to quantify reliably owing to the chronic lack of knowledge at every territorial level, from national to municipal. This article describes the results of a study on the features of urbanization in the 1950s in the peninsular regions of Central Italy, based on uniform historical maps of the entire country. The historical data were compared from a qualitative and quantitative viewpoint with the present-day geography of settlements. Interesting information has emerged on possible significant thresholds in the relationship between demography and urban use of land, in addition to data on landscape effects to be construed as signs of specific trends underway today and scarcely taken into account by land management tools.

One of the oucomes of a national reasearch about metropolis, post-metropolis and urban regions in Italy. This paper is included in A. Balducci, V. Fedeli & F. Curci (eds), Post-metropolitan territories, London, Routledge

Urban Morphology, 2002

This paper demonstrates the strong relationship between urban morphology and urban design within the Italian traditions of architecture and urbanism. Attention is focused on the work of architects and urban planners during the twentieth century, the period in which urban morphology and urban design emerged in Italy. A common cultural background shared by all those contributing to the field is the concept of 'type' and the assertion of a close connection between urban morphology and building typology. In contrast, different positions emerge in the interpretation of what the contemporary city should be, and this has, in turn, had an influence on the analysis of urban form. For this reason the typological debate in Italy has always had a strong ideological component. Instead of a common attempt at mutual understanding, urban morphology has been strongly characterized by a systematic, reciprocal misunderstanding among its followers. This paper attempts to define the multiplicity of cultural positions within the field according to the particular design and planning goals of those positions, in the conviction that the complexity of the current urban phenomenon can no longer be confronted from a single point of view.

LAND, 2020

The research presented in the paper intends to overcome an information gap on the evolution of urbanized surfaces in Italy which in the studies carried out so far have never been available. The only historical data on this form of land use date back to the 1950s, and were extracted from a national cartography created by the Military Geographic Institute. The next chronological section available was then that of the noughties, already digital. However, much more frequent data were processed by the ten-year censuses by the National Institute of Statistics, but concerning buildings and not urbanized areas. By processing building census data, this study has put together some novel information on land take dynamics between the end of World War II and the year 2000, highlighting the more intensive processes that occurred at an extraordinary rate in the ’70’s and ’80’s, obtaining unprecedented information on the speed of transformation of the territory in these decades of economic boom. Through this method, we were able to obtain numerous geographical indications previously lacking on a national scale, highlight the yet significant vigor of this phenomenon and develop an inferential scenario.

International Journal of Pentecostal Missiology, 2019

Unwarranted trust brings relational tension that could be avoided using more caution. Hence advocating “trust” is sometimes ill-advised. Inter-culturally, trust is likely to be particularly fraught, as intercultural gaps result in reduced levels of mutual understanding. Breaches of trust, both historical and contemporary, probably contribute to much mission work in recent times being short-term. Issues related to trust, such as time-keeping, how to ask questions, levels of expectation arising from particular ways of phrasing things, and financial predictability, are culturally dependent. Vulnerable missionaries, those who use local languages and local resources, can through making fewer demands