Sulla storia dei Quartieri Bassi e sul loro significato per il progetto

Once we thought of a city made of parts, i.e we used to think that it was possible to interpret the urban fabric as a mosaic made of different tesseras and that each tessera was a reflection of a specific historical time and of cultural, social and economic change. Then comes the 80s and the city as a perfect mosaic began to lose its tesseras… disused areas, empty spaces demonstrated that classes, rules and tools of the urban analysis by which we learnt to know the historical city and to build the new, weren’t so infallible and fixed as we believed… and we began to realize that architecture, by itself, was unable to provide answers for a city where, and perhaps luckily, borders, barriers and limits between different pieces and parts of the city were much flimsier than we might imagine. Today in 2015 the “contemporary city” is a “composite city” which seems to search for places where old and new meanings can coexist through a project capable of giving a new identity to spaces that have lost their original meaning. The “Quartieri Bassi” represent not only an area of Naples but also an urban structure that can be read as a symbol and model of this “composite city”. They are record and monument of the histories that followed one on another without finding synthesis, of many unfinished projects that reflected different “ideas of cities”… and, today, it is also a place of crisis, above all the crisis of the many economic activities that have always characterized these places and that today leave behind many “empty” spaces only sometimes filled with new meanings such as those linked to the new “multiethnic” city, to the proximity with the harbour and to the new economic relations with China. To answer the many questions posed by this unexpected city it is necessary to change our point of view. We have to start again not from the strengthened structure of the buildings or of the architectural typologies narrating so well the never-realized “ideas” of city but we have to start from the empty space, from that fluid substance which is so dynamic and vital that it could never be crystallize into a form.