Public Facilities: A Fragile, Yet Crucial Capital for Urban Regeneration

Abstract

The paper aims to discuss the crucial role of existing public facilities and areas in processes of urban regeneration. Public facilities and spaces (schools, sports, cultural and health centres, public parks and playgrounds) form a crucial collective infrastructure that drove urbanization processes in the past, while contributing on the construction of universal citizenship. They are widespread, albeit maintaining profound differences and heterogeneities concerning physical consistency, spatial distribution, state of maintenance, management forms. Indeed, the first operation consists of identifying possible situations (geographies) of the condition of welfare spaces in Italy. In particular, the paper debates the situations in which public facilities are already abundant and consolidated, yet inadequate to contemporary requirements/needs. The second part of the paper discusses the plural notion of ‘territorial fragility’ related to public facilities located in ‘intermediate’ and metropolitan territories. Finally, moving from realized urban projects and policies, the last part of the paper proposes to consider public facilities as a strategical element in urban regeneration interventions, on an urban and architectural scale.