THE ROLE OF TERRITORIAL INVARIANTS FOR REGENERATION PROJECTS IN "FORGOTTEN" URBAN AREAS. EXPERIENCES FROM THE APULIAN CONTEXT

Abstract

In times when territories are affected by radical changes which compromise the consolidated assets of the physical space, questioning the current practices of urban development, it seems necessary to define evolutive perspectives aligned with the territory identity without leaving aside considerations on the urban form, today strongly affected by abandonment and depopulation phenomena. Regarding these issues, in the Italian context is increasingly affirming a landscape-oriented approach to urban transformation that promotes territories valorisation on different levels by integrating environmental, landscape, social and economic dynamics. The approach is based on the comprehension and interpretation of the territorial palimpsest, reaching the recognition of the so-called “Structural Invariants”, which define the characters constituting the enduring identity of places and their landscapes. They relate to the constitutive rules, the result of co-evolutionary processes between human settlement and environment, which survive through historical fractures and changes. The Invariants, even if protected by a regulatory constraint system for conservation purposes, as much as they express physical integrity and territory identity, may represent vulnerability elements that can generate limitations in terms of use of certain city parts, causing abandonment, degradation and exclusion from urban dynamics. Under such circumstances, also considering the Pandemic condition and the importance of proximity as a value and the need for new spaces, it’s necessary to translate the recognized value into transformation objectives to reverse the degradation and abandonment tendency, generating conditions for a different territorial development going beyond the residential use dominance and finding the opportunity to be a development driver and a generator of new local economies. The contribution aims to highlight, through the analysis of some regeneration projects in Apulia (IT), how the acknowledgement of identity components, valorised as environmental infrastructures, with the ultimate goal of regaining and rehabilitate “forgotten” spaces, can give new meaning to certain city parts, also through the application of new generation “standards”.