The requalification/revitalization of historical city: proposals for Naples

The paper faces a key question of urban planning: defining policies and tools to start and address urban transformation processes targeted to requalification and revitalization of ambits inside the historical city and being marginal in functional, social, environmental and economic terms. The “requalification/revitalization” of historical town represents a priority challenge for many European and Italian cities: from Barcelona to Wien, from Genoa to Naples, current experiences show the difficulties of an hardly consolidated route that, although referring to common targets, follows really heterogeneous paths. The relation with the traditional planning rules, the recognition of the considered subjects plurality, the public/private relation, the risks related to urban identity loss are some of the questions issuing from current experiences. Moreover, the requalification/revitalization of marginal urban ambits, although included into historical urban fabrics, requires an approach being very different from the traditional urban project one. The dealt-with areas which often contain valuable pre-existences whose main problem doesn’t relate to architectural quality of buildings –on which the quality of urban projects is too often based– but to the choice of activities capable of revitalizing urban context, reviving and promoting its identity and peculiarities. Assuming that and basing on some experiences carried out in some historical towns, this paper defines the main features of a strategic plan for implementing, within the rules fixed by the Municipal Master Plan, the requalification/revitalization of an area included in Naples historical town. Besides, such a plan allows us to conceive strategies and actions of transformation, envisage public actor’s role, involve private citizens, fix time and resources needed for transformation.