Napoli. Spazi interstiziali e divergenze del ‘tactum’ nell’area della Marina. Note per la rigenerazione urbana

The processes of globalization and alienation that float through the urban contemporary culture permeating atmospheres densely, give us the image of a plural and multiple city. It is constantly in progress as a result of unstoppable dynamics which transmute even the traditional places of permanent configurations into unstable structures, porous and fragmented, tending to hybridization of its constituent parts and to the complexity of relationships. Phenomena of metissage, product by mutual influences among different ethnic groups, give rise to contamination of cultures and seem transposable in a changed identity of the contemporary city. This changes in a fragmented way like rejecting a unitary ‘concept’, and generates hybrid and uneven places which configure the urban archipelago and the mark of a city that abandons the adoption of immutable forms and exists even before its project. In these mechanisms of urbanization, the urban blanks play a fundamental role and in particular those ambiguous spaces and irregular, or residual, whose intrinsic connective properties define the potential of bonding agent, able to sew up and connect the laddered parts of the city. The particular figures and the indefinite concatenation of these 'mestizos' spaces are found in area of Marina in Naples, through the district ‘Porto’ and the district ‘Pendino’. If "space is what impedes that all is in one place", in this area of the city then it would seem left only space for the degradation and marginalization that may arise other urban or environmental infections or contamination. A double meaning of the contamination term is referable to the meaning of the Latin word ‘tactum’ which diverges into two very different (but always interactive) senses. A negative acceptation of ‘contagion’ or ‘infection’ clearly detectable in the area in examined and a positive acceptation of ‘interaction’ or ‘hybridization’, which is very attached to the cognitive value that is assigned by the contemporary culture to the concept of multiplicity. Both connotations are simultaneously found present in the area in examined, although with a different force. For the development of project interventions for urban regeneration, the positive valence of the phenomena of contamination is expressed more specifically in the intrinsic connective energy of the blanks among the buildings which are also called 'in-between' in the current language of contemporary architecture. These blanks are inherently null and shall be available to the intervention of urban regeneration as places appropriate to develop a new urbanity’s principle that constitutes them as a kind of potential infrastructure, giving rise to a unified vision for the city of the future.