Naples, a case study. Rise and Fall of contemporary art as a factor in urban design regeneration

The design is often considered as the crossroads of different disciplines. The designer has therefore played an increasing role as coordinator of different skills, assembler of hybrid materials, and concepts to be combined in new configurations. Historically, the city of Naples has presented a monumental heritage, of millenary origin, which represents a fundamental element of its urban identity. The paper aims to clarify the issues of a particular urban experience: the use of contemporary art as a decisive factor of the recent urban transformation of the city. That process, which went through the last fifteen years, has at present a disputed outcome. The city has been, since the nineties, the privileged ground testing of symbolic politicies. Here the public strategy generates a series of actions, whose communicative factor has been taken from contemporary art. Public art, integration between architecture, visual arts and town planning, offer extraordinary opportunities, for the art of taking an active role in social and cultural dynamics, fueling the debate on the meaning of the public, on the relationship between ethics and aesthetics. At the same time this cultural policy, without a temperate design management, has paradoxically increased the distance between the creative elite and ordinary people.