Ospedali hospitales. Infrastrutture abitate tra cura e cultura urbana

In the city of Naples, several hospitals can be traced, some older and of great historical-artistic value and others of more recent realization, which are in a condition of total or partial abandonment, waiting for reactivation strategies able to reinsert them into urban dynamics. They are real urban buildings, featured of a big scale, which have played important roles in the definition of the city stratification and which, over time, with the changing needs regulated by health techniques and disciplines, have gradually lost their original functions becoming places of uncertainty, but also a new terrain for design possibilities. Recent studies have investigated, on the one hand, the typological issues related to the abandoned hospitals, exploring the potentiality of the reuse of the “object-hospital” and, on the other, the urban issues relating to the relevant consequent processes of urban redevelopment that these elements can trigger in contemporary city. The aspect on which the contribution wants to concentrate on lies in the possibility that historic abandoned hospitals, through “shifts of meaning”, characterized by “amnesia” and “metamorphosis” processes, can be rethought as new urban public resources, as new places of hospitality. According to this vision, the abandoned hospitals can become “hospitable”, new lived infrastructures for the care of the city and for the well-being of citizens, both physical and cultural, through a project that is careful to define typological alterations, functional contaminations and urban interconnections and, therefore, to contemporary additions, to the crossings between inside and outside and to large-scale concatenations. New inclusive infrastructures, defined by hybrid spaces that mix care and culture, therapy and sociability. New infrastructures made up of stratified architectures that create multiple urban connections, which define a new city within the city, reactivating important places of social identity that citizens can return to live in everyday life.