Navalium Moenia : margo inter aquam et terram. Planning for La Spezia naval heritage

The regeneration-process of Military-assets, currently in-progress Europe-wide due to conversion of the scenario for global-Defense, has been considered the background for a Local Action Plan involving Naval or former-Navy -areas of the city of La Spezia, achieving the general aims and the specific headline-targets set-out in the Europe 2020 strategy. Not described in the official MAPS–network by the European Regional Development Found supporting UrbAct–projects, neither included in MAPS-Baseline Study (i.e. MAPS report, June the 1st, 2016/Version No.: 16), because still active, La Spezia Naval-Base and its Maintenance or Facilities –compounds, are currently subjects to a unique treatment keeping as stakeholders the Municipality, the University College of Genoa/Naval Engineering, as well as the Marina Militare/Italian Navy High-Command. A joint-venture figuring-out an absolute novelty, qualifying a case-study where a Military Institution is called to lead a process producing Military Areas as/for Public Space (so-called “MAPS”) even still scheduled as active military installation. Linking the General Plan for the city to the stages of intervention previously depicted, the design arranges a town-planning frame-work involving directly the entire Naval Heritage of La Spezia, using the “Leipzig Charter” on sustainable European cities as handbook. Furthermore, the urban agenda project so-developed, addresses to La Spezia the role of territorial-hub establishing linkages between sources presently available but disconnected and also different in identities: local and regional; civil and military; educational and working –experiences, practical and theoretical (re-orienting the urban-scapes to the “minimum landscapes”) are the basic-elements for a district-regeneration no more military or local, nor civil or global, but finally oriented to preserve an Heritage in its main characters. An Heritage having today the Mediterranean of yesterday: that sea once painted by a “murky cloud bottom at the edge of the sky […] is now a big pale-blue shout, beyond a banister of hills and houses.” (I. Calvino, 1947).