Learning from Naples from historical town to sustainable territory

The focus of the work carried out in several workshops, communications and discussions, also with programmed interventions and round tables, concerned the relationship that the historic city of Naples has with the cultural and scientific context of the overall metropolitan area, both in the cultural prominence that it has on national and international level. The issues addressed in four years of activity provide an important insight on the interest aroused and that grew up over the years of intense and exciting activity. The workshops involved students and teachers with integrated disciplinary skills in architectural design, environmental technology design, design and civil engineering. For the historical centers the current debate proposes to look at sustainability on the one hand in relation to its origin linked to the economic and ecological thinking, on the other hand to the entry into the debate of the concept of resilience. In fact, if sustainability has become an abstract notion, plastic - as defined by Serge Latouche - and substantially depleted, resilience is a scientific and empowering concept that imposes for every architectural intervention the comparison with the intrinsic capacity of systems to restore their state after the action of disturbing effects, and with the presence of objective limits with which to compare the actions undertaken, reducing the perturbing effects of human activities on nature. Since historical centers present the fragile situations typical of sensitive contexts, even so more, resilience requires reviewing the design approaches, standard actions and behaviors as they are conventionally implemented. The main objectives of projects based on the recognition of cultural values and on the research for sustainability conditions, which feed the urban resilience values of both buildings and open spaces, concern the basic and characterizing elements of urban areas, the priority actions for their compatible regeneration and the fulfillment of requirements that guarantee reduced environmental impact.