Reshaping existing buildings and public areas from a technological and social approach in Ponticelli, Naples

This project aims at investigating the potentialities of existing social housing buildings to be transformed into new vibrant community spaces, through a bottom-up approach able to merge consistently the spatial re-composition and the environmental enhancement. Due to the housing crisis and the lack of economic resources affecting the contemporary scenery, the existing inhabited blocks – when abandoned or badly maintained – currently represent a high value for the community as a whole. To tackle with a real situation, an experimental design approach has been applied onto a case-study located in Ponticelli. The site is located in the east part of Napoli municipality, which is experiencing important territorial and urban redevelopment processes. Large public investments are planned in the area, including a brownfield redevelopment, to realize new mixed-use districts and public infrastructure. The urban regeneration of Ponticelli district and its connection to the new development areas still represents a key planning issue at municipal level. The project argues that, starting from a design approach based on the small scale and punctual architectural transformations, it is possible to reach a major level of spatial adaptation to user needs. From these premises, the environmental quality increases and spreads toward a larger scale, triggered by buildings and public spaces retrofitting. Data have been collected on site in two different steps. A first preliminary site survey has been done in order to highlight the most relevant issues in the context of Ponticelli, taking into consideration social, environmental, technological conditions. Following this, an ad-hoc questionnaire has been set-up with a focus on the understanding of the relationships between users’ everyday habits, quality of living spaces (both for private and collective purposes) and state of housing maintenance. The questionnaires have been spread out to a sample of potential users, also through the socially-engaged associations that have been identified as the most active in the district. Members of the associations themselves have been interviewed in the phase of questionnaire preparation to make sure to include proper questions related to the users’ preferred activities in their free time and the spaces potentially needed. In the next steps these data are critically analyzed and compared with selected case-studies dealing with similar issues in order to outline an effective framework of minimal interventions to apply on site, able to transform the space and improve the quality of the community life. In the architectural design process, a new balance between private and collective uses of the space appears to determine a correspondence between social and spatial innovation, underpinned by a wide interpretation of the concept of social and climate resilience. Following the rhetorical base from Anne Lacaton, Jean-Philippe Vassal and Frédéric Druot, the design proposal is defined “from interior towards exterior”, linking the understanding of users’ necessities and the desired relation between private spaces and the urban context with the spatial, functional and technological need of retrofitting buildings and open spaces to improve social inclusion and environmental quality in the area. The design concept is based on the realization of a continuous parasite structure, the “Urban octopus”, as a new layer interacting with the existing building and spaces to solve environmental conditions as direct sun incidence , spatial/social issues as the existing illegal occupations in the ground floor, to provide the housing complex with new collective spaces such as playgrounds and meeting zones, to reinforce community building potentialities in the area as culture through street art on buildings’ facades and agricultural character with community gardening. Then it moves farther with near public areas as the ground floor and street, where most of the social interaction happens, defining an urban strategy that links the residential complex with the surrounding public buildings and De Simone Park. Here the condition of parasite structure, as a new independent floor able to tackle all problems, appears with the term “Urban octopus” which responds key issues such as social inclusion and environmental quality.