On the Traces of the Disappeared City: The Study of the Marks as a Strategies for the Urban Design

Abstract

The story of the covering of the Rio Darro, the river along whose shores arose the city of Granada in the VII century b. C., has provided the opportunity to make a research in order to recognise and studying the marks left in the existing urban fabric by some very important pre-existing historical elements. The river, indeed, was the subject of a long work of cover throughout the centuries, which was started back in the XVI century with the arrival of the Catholics Kings in Granada, and concluded only in the 30’s, and from which the study is started. The research was then extended to the analysis of the urban evolution of the city, which develops along the riverbed and turns as direct results of its covering, leaving in the two streets built on top of it the trace and the wound of this serious loss of its cultural and natural heritage. Alongside this mark, the research investigates other two systems whose traces are still visible in the urban fabric of the today city: the one of the ancient walls, mostly disappeared, at the point where they crossed the river, and the one of the bridges, now lost due of the cover of the river itself, in the correspondence of which we can now find streets that brings their names. The research wants to show how the study of this systems allows a clear interpretation of the current urban fabric, and at the same time provides the elements for a recovery project of the historic memory of the city, working with due regard to the contemporary public spaces. The philological study of traces and signs of historic derivation, and the strategic reuse of them, allow the coherent reconnection of the ancient public spaces arrived to the present day, while creating new ones, claiming how the recovery of the cultural heritage might be not just the purpose but the tool through which it is possible to project the modern city.