Bagnoli: cyclical narratives of failed reclamation, unfinished projects and ownership changes vs. incremental regeneration scenarios

Abstract

The urban, design and ownership story of the former industrial plain of Bagnoli draws one of the most intertwined, inextricable and difficult to deal with narratives in the recent history not only of Naples, but of the entire country, crossing the economic interests, but also the environmental, social and political ones of an incredible place for its strategic and landscape position.
The contribution tries to build a reflection starting from the recognition, albeit synthetic and incomplete, of the events that from the beginning of the twentieth century to today have given us an area in a suspended condition, due to the sometimes conflicting decisions of the many actors who in over thirty years have grappled with the "Bagnoli question". An area that today presents strong contrasts and contradictions, on which territorial and planning arrangements have been imposed over time, and in which instead highly dynamic landscapes are juxtaposed and contrasted with other tenaciously static ones.
A geographical area that suggests and stimulates the possibility of investigating new pacts between the city and the cultural value of its past, also the subject of educational exercises conducted in some Laboratories of DiARC UNINA (a.y. 2022/23) in which, through a strongly multidisciplinary dimension, an incremental design strategy was shared, capable of reasoning on differentiated times and imagining to reactivate "the park by design and functionally autonomous parts that already exists", but aiming at a unitary design