Urban Regeneration through Alternative Public Spaces

Many cities developed, or were founded, as trading centres; trade is vitally important for these cities, hence their need to remain open organisms accepting change over time and space, to avoid an otherwise inevitabile decline. When cities are expanding and dilating their boundaries they are less likely to prosper than when they attempt to imagine themselves within their perimeters. This recreation of the city within its boundaries is a common characteristic of present-day European cities which are passing through a period of transition. Recognizability is linked to difference, to the non-homologation of all places. So urban identity is determined by the correlation between differences, from which derives an unrepeatable originality. The relational space of the contemporary city is a sort of flexible territory, devoid of figurative recognition, but full of potential for service. In modern open cities, the spaces between buildings have become mere distancing mechanisms with no character. The ever-increasing amount of urban space and free land required for vehicles to circulate and park makes it difficult to properly formalize the essence of these spaces, protagonists despite everything, which simply remain empty. This de-qualification of open spaces stridently signals the loss of a principle of city construction: cities are increasingly divided into voids; this symbolizes the waste of existing resources and also highlights the absence of content. The ungovernability generated by the constant transformation processes within the built-up area, is such that the only possible resource for redefining the image of the city is a vacuum. We must therefore ask ourselves what the many squares overlooked and exploited as car parks can become, the road service areas with the advent of the electric car and the affirmation of e-commerce, such as the replacement of obsolete buildings in urban centers they can create unpublished public spaces, as peripheral specialized districts can redeem themselves with alternative spatiality, as the promotion of public mobility can also promote spatiality, as the various forms of urban art can in a widespread manner redevelop entire cities, including suburbs. Even destructive events such as earthquakes can suggest the reconstruction of public spaces in an alternative way.