Taranto. Città dei tre mari

The beauty of the morphological structure of this territory, suspended between two seas, can regenerate Taranto. The two “breasts” of the mar Piccolo determine an unexpected lagoon landscape which is counterpointed by the orderly and silent irrigated plot of the agricultural landscape. Natural waterways and artificial canalizations retrace, as in the case of the "big leaf", located to the west of the built city, the orographic microtopography, otherwise invisible. Starting from its foundation and up to the construction of the nineteenth-century city, the relationship with the two seas was the distinctive feature of the city until the establishment of military areas and the advent of large-scale industry that built barriers along the coasts. The same can be said about the growth by addition of homogeneous urban parts of social housing from the 1950s to the 1980s which followed logics established by models born elsewhere. Starting from these considerations, the theme "From social housing to social Habitat" was developed to establish dialogic relationships between the context and the three social housing districts Taburi, Salinella and Paolo VI. The aim of the project proposal is the re-foundation of the three districts starting from the creation of their necessary relationship with the sea. The method was to reinterpret the specific genetic codes, marked by the evolution of public building regulations, in relation to three new infrastructural interventions aimed at configuring the new public spaces of Taranto on the sea: a monumental waterfront above the railway for Tamburi; the hydraulic recovery of the "big leaf" for Salinella; a new equipped axis between Paolo VI and the Tosi shipyards on the sea. Paraphrasing the celebrated written by Anna Maria Ortese, The sea will bathe Taranto.