Confiscated Assets in Transition. An operational atlas for the metamorphosis project

n some cases, assets confiscated from the mafia constitute an extensive and heterogeneous collection of public goods whose value remains largely unexplored. Ignored or removed, they suffer from a deficit of description, which should instead be undertaken as a fundamental action in the creation of a new system of critical knowledge. Identifying and describing the role of the forms built by criminal forces in the processes of urban territorial construction is the basis for a more articulated strategy of social and political regeneration, which must be implemented through the concrete metamorphosis of confiscated buildings, in order to re-signify their spatial and semantic values and thus complete their transition to public assets. The PRIN 2022 PNRR research project Confiscated Assets in Transition, From the Anti-city to the Third Heritage (UniRC dAeD, (PI); UniNa Federico II, DIARC; UniPa, DARCH) aims to investigate the role of the project as a practice for transforming criminal spaces through the construction of an Operative Atlas. This one is intended as both a synthesis tool for newly uncovered knowledge about Confiscated Assets and as an intervention tool. Its purpose is to emancipate the transformative action from the mere reuse defined by the legal framework, converting it instead into a substantial metamorphosis that forcefully proposes new values of civic reappropriation for these spaces, now symbols of the state and once denied.A collective introduction will be followed by the three specific approaches with which the research units have explored the subject, focusing respectively on the relationship between confiscated assets and social reuse, institutional reuse, and transitional practices and uses in the three emblematic cities of Reggio Calabria, Palermo, and Naples. The direct relationship with the case studies, their territories, the institutional actors and the communities involved in the restitution processes will serve as the framework for the continuous interplay between theoretical, critical, interpretative and interdisciplinary levels in which the research has developed and continues to unfold.