Geography and architecture of the infrastructures of the port

The commercial and shipbuilding relocation of the new "Port Plans" return to the city wide spaces on the sea and trigger in urban landscapes radical processes of refounding of the relative systems. Paradoxically, the more pronounced specialization of port traffic offers the opportunity to recover the fracture originated in the nineteenth-century city with the transformation of the port from "square on the sea" into "specialized area". In experimental research on the Sicilian port cities of Palermo and Messina, the infrastructure architecture confirms, as in other port cities, that it is the most effective method of reading and reconfiguration of heterogeneous contemporary waterfronts. To restart from the type and architecture of the streets that surround and depart from the ports allows the global, geographical resinification of the relational logic of the urban plan. Due to the inherent structuring potential of these privileged axes of the port city, it is possible “to remodel" the coastal landscape and to give back to the port its representative and central role. The complementary methodology of "regeneration" of the port areas also appears clearer, dictated by the different and direct level of relationships that they, as a complex and historical part of the city, establish with the urban structure. Whatever the configuration of the port city, this primary infrastructural pole of confluence of sea and land flows enhances its myths and significance. It is the keeper of a similar but specular history of the city that influences its development over time through successive overlays (Messina) or extensions (Palermo). An operation aimed at "returning" to the square on the sea it is not simply a re-invention of the "voids". It requires, as in the historical city, a confrontation with architecture, stratified fragments and traces, with spaces which spontaneously modify, revealing their inherent relational and monumental vocations.