Beyond the Enclosure: historic zoos, Modern Architecture and interspecies coexistence. The case of the Naples Zoological Garden

The modern zoo represents one of the most controversial sites of the contemporary city: a space of captivity and pedagogy, of control and spectacle, where the historical relationship between humans and non-humans is reflected. Zoological gardens built in the twentieth century – such as the Naples Zoological Park, designed in the postwar period by Luigi Piccinato – now raise urgent questions of environmental justice, animal welfare, and architectural conservation. What should be done with these spaces once they are deemed obsolete? How might they be transformed into places of coexistence without erasing their material and symbolic memory?