Critical reassessment in port cities’ maintenance plan

The observation of the transformation processes in western port cities’, is the analytical background of an investigation aimed to contextualize maintenance procedures, taking into account new conflicts and failure dynamics. The experiences previously realized in European cities, indicate that the new asset that port spaces tend to assume, reveal unused conditions of conflict between the urban functions and the services offered by areas for passengers, commerce and shipbuilding, with relapses in terms of activities and direct impact on morphologies, distributions, flows. Conceiving the maintenance plan as an opportunity to establish a system of rules that coordinate technical and financial resources, the detection of conflicts and the systematization of failures referred to ports, open unexplored areas of research, establishing new priorities in a setting of integrated management for the city. The opportunity to redesign connections between space assets and functions, prefiguring, under a unitary approach, satisfactory relationships between users' requirements and spaces' performances, will be the subject of the paper, which analyzes as case study the port of Naples in particular the area between the Molo Angioino and Piazza Municipio. The research will be developed through three areas: • area of knowledge, acquisition of information, analysis of the context; • area of the interactions, systemic approach to define site’s vulnerability; • area of management, strategies to solve conflicts among different authorities. The reassessment for the maintenance plan is oriented to the integration of the process control, to guarantee high functional performances in port cities’ lifecycle.