In-between spaces. The former psychiatric hospitals, new urban ghosts

The following reflections are developed in the frame of a larger on-going research project about the possible future of former psychiatric hospitals. They were closed and often forgotten following to the Law n. 180 in 1978 that ordered the closure of one of the Foucault’s total institutions, which was the most heavily marked by the interweaving of urban, architectural, medical and human histories. Built beyond the city boundaries, according to the law, these institutions are nowadays inside the contemporary city, and are surrounded by new urban fabrics, infrastructural networks, large facilities. With respect to this changed contextual condition and in spite of their remarkable size, these former hospitals appear as suspended spaces, large temporal and spatial intervals, urban ghosts. These enclaves are clearly detached by the surrounding urban shapes and yet fully plunged into the body of the contemporary city, and are therefore emblematic of a sort of in-between spaces. Not only have they not been assimilated through the urban transformative processes, but their enclosures have so far been considered as off-limit boundaries. The psychiatric medical buildings have been the object of a damnatio memoriae, a voluntary oblivion. A strong emphasis was put on the closure of psychiatric hospitals and their abandonment was meant to be displayed, thus a long time has passed since their closure before any recovery project of abandoned buildings could even be conceived. This long time has yet widened until the era of the ruins has finally come. In this, not only physical, frame, the in-between space is everything that is inside the enclosure, including the fence itself. A complex whole to be re-thought no longer, or not only, according to the inner set of relationships, but with respect to the need to construct other relationships that overcome the fence and face the different scales and the different systems of the contemporary city. Machines à soigner, the psychiatric hospitals were built, from the end of XIX and the beginning of XX century, according to peculiar musts of psychiatry and with respect to a clear matching between use and form. Similarly their dismantlement was due to a sudden and radical change of medical scientific theories in the field of the mental disease treatment. The present study has already marked some meaningful steps (beyond the elaboration of concepts and projects at school, it has been the object of a video presented at Expo2015). It is now a main topic within research academic projects as well as well-founded hypothesis about the re-cycle and reuse of those former hospitals in future urban transformations. Forty years after the law and twenty years after the actual delayed closure of those hospitals, these in-between spaces are a complex heritage and the necessity to re-cycle their remains arises. From former hospitals, archives are left, along with libraries, a large amount of buildings, and a huge mass of green. All these materials are ruins enclosed in citadels, whose architectural layout and typologies are easily recognizable.The need to re-cycle is due to the need to put an end to the waste that had been made so far. These in-between spaces are now often new potential urban centralities. Away from the hypothesis to museificate these spaces, nor on the contrary to upset their meaningful heritage, does the methodological approach to this issue gather complex procedures, where cooperation between public and private partners is needed. Different uses must be taken into account, which are consistent with the intrinsic features of heritage as well as with the complex new sets of external relationships through different scales and contexts. Starting from the description, splitting and re-composition of elements and spaces, the design processes will structure hypothesis that will cope with differently intense transformations at different scales. These in-between spaces that are today blocked, must become dynamical spaces, where the sense of heritage is clearly visible and where new interpretations of contemporary time and space are possible. As an example of in-between spaces within the frame of heritage and re-cycle, a synthesis of meaningful cases is here presented as well as a case study on the psychiatric hospital ‘Leonardo Bianchi’ in Naples. Here the resistance to the modification becomes a positive element for a project of re-existence.