Fragility as a Knoweldge Paradigm for Design in Urban Terroir

The paper reflects on the concept of fragility as an opportunity for situated design practices in marginal contexts of the built environment. In particular, the study investigates fragility as a bottom-up way of knowing in opposition to top-down methodologies. If the latter are based on the recognition of patterns, normalization and modeling to inform decision-making processes with understandable data, the first is based on contested observations, subjective viewpoints, micro-narrations, outlining latent tensions and negotiations potentials between objects, human and non-human actors within their eco-socio-technical milieu. In this sense, a fragility-based design approach might be crucial, especially in conditions of informational uncertainty or urban fragmentation. The work experiments a case study in Quartieri Spagnoli in Naples (IT), a peripherical area of the historical center of the city, to explore a methodology to help designers and decision-makers to take into account elements that are usually ignored or underestimated in data-driven approaches, through their recognition as elements of environmental devices, i.e. infrastructures of relationships between objects, subjects and their context. This recognition is crucial to help designers to reinterpret urban design processes as acts of “taking care”, aimed at support local actors in the transformation of their contexts accordingly with ecological capacities, social aspirations and technological dispositions.