T’era Park: un catalogo di strategie possibili per le memorie delle eterotopie di Napoli Est

This paper presents results of a research carried out in Belgium, France, Hollande and United States about the destiny – foreseeable or possible – of heterotopias, a huge heritage of XIX and XX centuries’ architectonic and cultural estate. Between those multiple “situated utopias” that have defined some parts of cities’ extensions – nowadays signed and designed by their surrounding walls – we have investigated “heterotopias of deviation” about death and madness. Cemeteries and psychiatric asylums are usually located in a same urban system shaped by juxtaposition of surrounding walls. In that way they have defined an urban craquelé that describe a chapter of the urban history that started by the switch from the dualism “city-countryside” to a new dualism “city-heterotopia”. Referring to the time when surroundings walls weren’t anymore considered a limen between the intramoenia city and the extramoenia lands, the city spreads segregating, refusing, fencing those parts of society considered like “deviants” in order to forget them. Fourteen years later the Basaglia law – that approved the closure of asylums – it has become necessary to rethink about that heritage. Those constructions are considerable like emergences in a double meaning. Not so often decay and neglect were stopped, or limited, in those psychiatric asylums. In some cases, it was possible thanks to actions aimed to give new meanings to those places. Nowadays this heritage is almost completely denied and unknown by society. Therefore, it’smarked and afflicted by a time of neglect and ruins. Cemeteries are a current topic which is always transforming itself. To the present changes in social, cultural and technical fields must correspond a new and different approach to those places. We need to rethink about those “lastscapes” conception in order to answer to new and mutable demands. Starting from the interpretation of reuse and recycle case studies about those citadels of madness and death, this paper is wondering about possible interactions, intersections and mixes between those obsolete places of confinement. According to a heuristic process approach that looks to the project as a research product and that uses research and project as pillars, we make correspond to the posed questions and to the definition of a possible project demand, a “catalogue of possible strategies”. In other words, a project of a process of recycle for the former psychiatric asylum Leonardo Bianchi in Naples as a memorial park. T’era Park is the proposal of a place of memory and health. It will be a place where the “city of death” and the “city of life” can be forging relations. We mean a place where a contemporary interpretation of cemeteries can be seen as a possibility of economic and cultural raising for a cultural neglect that becomes an artistic and cultural park.