The Art of Completing the City: From Recovery to Reuse?

Leonardo Rignanese

Department of Science in Civil Engineering and Architecture (DICAR), Polytechnic University of Bari, Italy

Abstract: The intervention on the city’s heritage — building, urban, territorial — is an increasingly topic with which urban planning reflection and practice is measured and compared. What was once the building restoration of historic centers, today highlights a significance including interventions that involve the overall reorganization of an area or an urban part. So recovery has become a way of interpreting many aspects of the city and the territory: environmental recovery, recovery of the building heritage, recovery of disused areas, recovery of suburbs etc., with a proliferation of differently defined tools — from redevelopment to regeneration — that involve practices of intervention in the existing, up to the more or less temporary reuse of many urban and peri-urban spaces. Taking care of the existing — the landscape, the historical and consolidated city, the redevelopment of the recent territories of the suburbs and of the urban margins — often links to punctual interventions required by occasions, and implies an interpretative approach in the search for new spatial and organizational relations, to which attribute a more general sense: this approach calls for a new representation of the city and the territories, an idea of the city, and a strategy of intervention that cannot be attributed only to processes of densification and resilience. In this situation, it is not important searching for a sovereign order, but rather finding more stable rules of urban space, defining its constituent materials: a return to the art of completing the city.

Key words: scenarios, urban design, urban renewal