Third places and transitory uses: the experimental project "Hall -Hamicycle Agrifood Living Lab" in the East of Naples

Buildings and unused spaces, grounds for experimentation for temporary uses, are known in France for years as “tiers lieux”, or third places where hybrid programs and incremental processes are experimented with for the transformation of abandoned spaces. Italy, and particularly the city of Naples, has started to take an interest in the experimentation of temporary uses, approving with Municipal Council Resolution No. 30 of 2022 a “Draft Convention for the regulation of temporary uses for public spaces and publicly owned real estate.“ It is not coincidental that within the framework of the “CA23 Plural Territories Architecture Festival of 2023”, the Living Lab “Inhabiting the City in Transition. Evolutionary projects for the reuse of urban buildings” was held in Naples. Evolving projects for the reuse of large abandoned urban containers, focused on the theme of temporary uses. The Living Lab provided the opportunity to test integrated design projects on some of the numerous abandoned buildings that dot the urban landscape of the city of Naples. Among the most interesting cases is the case study of a nineteenth-century building, the head of a now-disused productive urban block, which became the subject of study for the thesis “Hall-Hemicycle Agrifood Living Lab, transitional agritecture for East Naples,” following the Festival. The thesis project is based on an experimental methodology that integrates design, economic appraisal and evaluation tools and methods to advance a proposal for incremental and adaptive reuse that unveils the latent potential of the abandoned spaces of the urban block in question, returning meta-processes aimed at demonstrating the feasibility and potential (multivalued) activatable through the experimentation of temporary uses.