The places of the crisis as a gnoseological field of new interpretative processes

Abstract

The research filed is the plastic-masonry territory of Mediterranean, focused on the city of Taranto: a city of ancient Magna Graecia, characterized by an extraordinary historical-archaeological-landscape palimpsest, for decades subject to regressive transformations, due to vast industrial plants and scattered settlements, detached from the organic relationship with the historic city, with its sea, with the countryside. The aim is to experiment methods to resolve the pathologies of the contemporary city with regard to the palimpsest inherited from urban history, focusing above all on public spaces. The method is based on the historical-processual reading, aimed at understanding the formative phases of the city and at identifying and classifying the phenomena composing and characterizing the aggregative space. Starting from this reading, the essay proposes a reflection on regressive phenomena, through a project experimenting a critical relationship between original codes, organic evolutions, critical transformations and their possible re-meanings. The project site is to the north of ‘Mar Piccolo’, a sea basin facing the historic city. An area with landscape values, subject to regressive phenomena due the presence of the largest steel plant in Europe and bounded by the shipyards and the ‘Tamburi’ district, detached from the direct relationship and organic with the historical city. These issues allow to reflect critically not only on the specific theme, but also on the meaning and methods of the contemporary project. Rethinking these places in fact means making a critical and multidisciplinary comparison between consolidated urban codes and the current needs. A comparison that becomes the gnoseological field through which to plan the renewal actions according to a critical continuity capable, at the same time, of revealing new meanings of urban grammar.