The Historical City. A Critical Reference and Role Model

The Historical City: A Critical Reference and Role Model addresses a contradiction concerning historical cities in Europe. On the one hand, the historical city is experiencing a time of extraordinary difficulties due to desertion, pathological phenomena of hyper-occupation associated with tourism (which experienced a momentary subversion by the Covid-19 pandemic), as well as processes of social and physical deterioration. Simultaneously, the historical city serves as a paradigm for the sustainable development of urban forms: we are used to hearing concepts such as “creative city”, “15-min city”, “recovery of community sociality”, etc. However, implementing these solutions demands a shift of perspective. In addition to the necessity of preserving historical cultural excellence, it is essential to examine the social, economic, and political activities in the historical city in light of its ample qualities. If the purpose is to care for the city as a whole, as a common good, then everyday heritage is just as important as exemplary heritage. Because of the ever-changing nature of a citizens’ everyday life, these qualities need special attention. A steady effort is also required to make urban qualities accessible to both “permanent” and “temporary” citizens. As a result, developing a shared conceptual and operational framework across humanistic, scientific, and technological research domains is paramount. By creating a multivocal and interdisciplinary arena, the present volume brings together a wide range of thoughts and approaches that address the intricacies of dealing with the historical city today. The volume, thus, is divided into five topical parts: (1) Sensing the Historical City: Between Physical and Digital; (2) The Imperfect Citizenship of the Historical City; (3) Urban Art as a Tool for Preservation/Innovation of the Historical City; (4) Critical and Historical Narratives on Historical Cities; and (5) Histories of Historical Cities.

The text questions the possibility of identifying a field of research-action for the History of Architecture and for Urban History that is more defined and more specifically referable to the disciplinary structure than the broad field of Cultural Heritage. The hypothesis is to identify, to define as a field of research-action, the Italian “historical city” from the Second World War to the present day. The object “historical city” offers, in this chronology, in relation to the multiple disciplinary vision required by the action-research, a specific opportunity, that is, almost by tautology, the inevitable confrontation, on the part of each discipline, with the political dimension of the city that can construct a common field of reflection on the specific disciplinary outcomes.

The following text aims to place alongside a historical prospection on the character and development of urban phenomena in the historical city an aesthetic perspective on their sensory, imaginative and productive impact of new forms of experience. In order to reach that goal, it sketches some themes on which to focus the aesthetic reading of urban culture and events, starting from the outline of a possible new urban aesthetics. As well as it tries to read across some of the contributions to the present volume, enhancing their intertwining of aesthetic instrumentation and redefinition of the understanding of the city.

This chapter examines the relationships between the soma (the living, sentient, purposive, culturally shaped body) and varieties of space, both public and private. After considering the ways the soma both defines space and is conversely defined or shaped by it, the chapter explores the soma as constituting in itself a space that is articulated into different parts with different significance. Here we critique the familiar view that the body is essentially a private matter by instead showing the body’s crucial role in public space and the body’s own expression of the public/private distinction through its division into public and private parts or spaces. This leads to a discussion of the nature and value of public space, considering both philosophical and legal approaches to defining such space and its relationship to privately owned space. Among the key values examined are democratic freedom of access, mobility, and expression but also social integration. However, these values face a problematic dialectic of inclusion and exclusion with respect to the range of the public and particularly concerning those individuals or groups who are on or beyond its margins and thus are regarded as other. The chapter concludes by noting the discomfort of one such other, the Man in Gold (a performative art figure), as he tries to negotiate the public spaces of the Colombian port city of Cartagena, late one Saturday night.

In the weeks of the lockdown, we experienced a ghost town that paradoxically returned to having a physical consistency. Based on the definition of “specter” provided by Jacques Derrida, the text proposes to interpret the emergence of this city in relation to the quality-of-life policies, both relying on the conceptualizations of some contemporary authors and by setting the problem in relation to the perceptual canons that correspond to the current transformations of the historical city.

This chapter explores the relationships among seeing, knowledge, and power, with seeing treated as a metaphor for knowledge and conferring a sense of power. Viewing these relationships as ongoing social processes influenced by cultural, political and technological dynamics, the chapter explores attentiveness to the built environment in the age of information and communication technologies (ICTs). The study is based on an interdisciplinary methodology (qualitative and quantitative) that assesses the familiarity of individuals with their daily environment and their own assessment of their awareness of the spatial environment. The chapter concludes with a discussion on the meaning of the findings and contemporary practices of seeing, raising critical questions about the historical city.

Alex Rhys-Taylor is an urban sociologist at the Goldsmiths University of London. His works are based on the relationship between experiences of the city (e.g., multisensory experiences) and histories of change. Given the importance of sensory methodologies in social sciences, the following conversation addresses their role in the comprehension of contemporary urban changes (e.g., touristification and housing crisis), social processes of discrimination (e.g., cultural disgust), and social history of urban areas (e.g., inner city and culinary experiences). These issues are addressed during the conversation by discussing the methodological and empirical implications of concepts like intersensoriality, sensescapes, inner city, and between the digital and the physical city.

Joe Blakey is an environmental and political geographer, and Lecturer in Human Geography at the University of Manchester. His work focuses on post-foundational political theories within Human Geography, the politics of aesthetics, and the role of experts in shaping political and social change. His writings deal with issues such as representation, carbon accountability, and the politics of scale. His forthcoming book (edited with Amy Barron) explores the theme of “Aesthetics and the City”, proposing aesthetics as a fruitful concept for critical reflections on the enduring relevance of “the city” to urban thought. This shared interest in aesthetics and the city has provided the basis for the present conversation.

The following contribution will address the birth of the historical city as one of the outcomes of modern urbanization, influenced by the Romantic reaction to industrialization and by the rising tourist gaze. Following especially Choay and Lefebvre’s theorizations—respectively regarding the establishment of the heritage discourse and of urban society—the tourist-historic city is interpreted as the dialectical synthesis of the violent renovation of the old urban structures and the contemporary opposition to a total erasure of the traces of the past. Finally, it will be argued that this synthesis will then gain the peculiar conceptual form of the ‘museum’, and that this figure will transform the historical city into an aesthetic commodity on which the rising tourist industry could operate in the context of spectacular capitalism.

The chapter has three objectives. The first is to discuss what is a socio-political psychology of the city. The second is to explore what can a socio-political psychology of the city offer for a better understanding of the processes and dynamics happening in—and about—the inner-city historical neighbourhoods, in particular those today under transformation through the powerful forces of urban renewal, gentrification, and turistification. These forces are not just making residents (re)construct their attachments to the transformed places, but also triggering processes and dynamics that express battles of ideas and citizenship about how to define the “urban common good” and who and what values should intervene in that definition. Finally, the third goal is to present some examples of a socio-political psychology of the city conducted in Lisbon, a city today highly affected by the forces of gentrification and touristification.

During the post-war era, tourism was recognized as a crucial sector for development, particularly in developing countries like Turkey that lacked significant industrialization but possessed rich natural and cultural heritage. The case study of Antalya, a historic coastal city in southern Turkey, exemplifies how both national and international dynamics played a role in the implementation of state-led projects aimed at utilizing tourism for development. International organizations, such as the World Bank, formulated various schemes to achieve development via tourism. However, it was the national institutions that turned these plans into action. In Turkey, this has been possible through the formulation of five-year development plans by public bodies. Furthermore, during this period, there was a shift in focus towards the conservation of entire historic areas, rather than solely individual buildings, aligning with international trends in heritage preservation. In Turkey, an expert committee gained bureaucratic power over decision-making processes concerning cultural heritage conservation. In 1973, they drafted a new law that enabled the designation of entire areas as conservation zones. Antalya’s old yacht harbor and the walled city were designated as such, with the objective of transforming them into a tourist center. This project entailed the establishment of a state-led tourism development initiative. Another significant investment came from the World Bank, which supported the South Antalya Tourism Development Project. However, the conservation efforts faced criticism due to their impact on residents and the living conditions within the designated areas. Construction restrictions imposed by the conservation plan led to discontent and posed threats to the inhabitants’ quality of life. Similar issues were observed in other designated sites across Turkey during the 1970s, highlighting the discrepancy between preservation standards and the actual living conditions experienced by local communities. Overall, the case study of Antalya exemplifies the complex interplay between state-led development efforts, tourism, heritage conservation, and the social impact on local communities during the Cold War era.

Since the Middle Ages, Bologna, as a historical university city, has been a hub for large numbers of students moving there for the purpose of study and residing within its boundaries as temporary citizens. But to whom does the city belong? The ways in which students inhabit the city today, both in the public and the domestic spheres, are constantly shaping and being shaped by this urban culture. This chapter explores the everyday fabric of student life in Bologna through insights from history, interviews with current students, and a reflection on the notion of “appropriating” spaces.

Contemporary cities are facing several changings (i.e., housing crises, touristification, and studentification) which have significant consequences on the processes of dwelling. Particularly in university cities, these transformations are influencing the co-existence processes between university students and other groups of city dwellers. Despite extensive research on the political life of students, there is a lack of studies that consider how students address these transformations through their political participation practices, and which are their implications for urban places. This research aims at analyzing how students’ political participation transforms urban places, adopting the theoretical lenses of place-making, with a specific focus on bottom-up place-making processes. The preliminary results of an ethnography conducted in Bologna will be presented. Between May 2022 and February 2023, participant observations were conducted during students’ participatory practices in public places (e.g., demonstrations, parades, occupations, performances) involving various university groups (i.e., academic associations, political and artistic collectives). The initial phases of the Reflective Thematic Analysis conducted on fieldnotes, is focused on students’ right claims, on the strategies of place-making employed during participatory practices (i.e., transformation of the place’s functions, transformation of places’ norms of interaction, emplacement), and on how these practices relate to urban borders (porosity).

Problematizing the idea of cities as neutral and unproblematic spaces, the chapter discusses how social hierarchies and conflicts between different ideas of citizenships are embedded in the physical and symbolic elements of urban contexts. Looking specifically at young people as a marginal urban population, the chapter argues that adult-centric ideas shaping city planning and urban policies limit young individuals’ right to the city through a marginalisation and stigmatization of their presence and practices in the public space. These premises are developed through the analysis of the emerging phenomenon of the so-called ‘youth gangs’, a catchy label used by the media and capable of orienting public debate. The chapter looks at a series of youth conflictual practices that are often labelled as ‘youth gang actions’ as claims of belonging and recognition expressed by marginalized segments of the youth population, reflects on the risks of radicalization connected to the adoption of stigmatizing and criminalizing approaches and discusses the opportunity of recognizing these practices’ potential for urban transformation.

Art has always been an important part of the aesthetic dimension of cities. Power and politics, cultural traditions and references, social status, as well as current aesthetic and artistic regimes have been made visible through a variety of different types of artistic works in the urban sphere. This has significant repercussions for the aesthetics of contemporary cities. Especially interesting is the case of historic cities in the face of the need to reinvent and sustain identity at the same time. This paper traces some of the different forms of contemporary art focusing on how they affect the overall urban aesthetic and experiential dimension in the context of the specifically European historic city. The theoretical underpinnings of the significance of art in the urban context follow recent developments in philosophical and applied urban aesthetics. Emphasis within this approach is given to the urgency of urban sustainability transformations, in which art can be also an important catalyst and facilitator.

This essay explores the role of urban public art in challenging gender and sexual norms. Throughout urban history, public art has traditionally honoured and visibilised powerful figures, which has sustained hetero-patriarchal dominance as reflected in the visual culture of cities. Little space has been historically established for marginalised populations, including LGBTQ+ people, to be seen in the city. The essay highlights the importance of ‘queer monuments’, public art dedicated to the lives of LGBTQ+ people, in disrupting traditional public art patronage through allowing greater visibility of sexual diversity in urban public space. The essay uses brief examples from a research project to discuss queer monuments’ socially inclusive potentials. It also argues that queer monuments, although typically initiated by LGBTQ+ activists, should be viewed within the broader fight for recognising multiple marginalised identities. This perspective underlines an understanding of queer monuments as ‘more-than-queer’, extending beyond concerns with sexuality and gender alone.

Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, an ambitious urban renewal project has been carried out in the heart of Bogotá. In 2016, the old Bronx Street, the epicentre of drug sales and consumption in the city, was vacated. Consequently, many of its residents, especially street dwellers and drug users for whom the Bronx was a refuge, were expelled, institutionalized or disappeared. The excuse for the intervention was the recovery of a strategic sector that had been socially and architecturally degraded by drug trafficking violence. Today, a mega-project for cultural industries called the “Bronx Creative District” is being built on the ruins of the old neighbourhood. And in the only house that was left standing, a museum. This chapter describes the curatorial and action-research experience developed by a group of young ex-residents of the Bronx, the National Museum of Colombia and the Mayor's Office of Bogotá. This work, materialized in the creation and memory laboratory “La Esquina Redonda”, has allowed the circulation, in museum spaces, of materialities and museological counter-narratives about the “war on drugs”, harm reduction, street life and social exclusion in Colombia. A critical reading of this experience provides elements to think about the public management of ruins and uncomfortable memories in a country that urgently needs to change perspective and learn to live with drugs.

The following text aims to address the relationship between art and public space focusing on the memorial strategies that unfold in it and the relationship they have with the aesthetic, perceptual-sensorial sphere, through the urban dimension. Beginning by noting the various tendencies to subject forgetting and memory to a kind of neutralizing naturalization or reinclusion, the following text will discuss, first, a number of forms of remembrance that insist on nonlinearity, latency, and that take place in whole or in part below the level of consciousness (§ 2). The discourse will then move on to examine the intertwining of theoretical problems and realizations of memorial paths based on innovative experiential forms (§ 3). And to analyze some specific cases in which the memorial process in public space, particularly in the Berlin context, is put at the center, comparing the results, as in the case of Libeskind’s Jewish Museum and Stih and Schnok’s Places of Remembrance (§§ 4–6). To conclude with a review of the acquisitions that this trajectory has made possible (§7).

The purpose of this chapter is to propose a critical examination of the rationale and modes of intervention employed by urban artistic practices. The aim is to illuminate their role in influencing the transformations occurring within historic cities. To this purpose, I will analyze the temporary art-work Loro-Them (Milan, 2019) by artist Krzysztof Wodiczko. I will illustrate how the interpretative stance of the artistic practice connects with memory work when it addresses socio-spatial challenges and processes of change in and of the historic urban context.

Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti was a prominent Italian art critic, historian, and politician who made significant contributions to the preservation and understanding of historic cities in Italy. This paper explores Ragghianti's life, his ideas on the historic city, and his efforts to promote cultural heritage conservation. It examines his influential role in shaping the discourse on historic preservation and urban planning, highlighting his multidisciplinary approach that combined art history, architecture, and social sciences. Ragghianti's work serves as an important reference for understanding the value of historic cities as repositories of collective memory, cultural identity, and social cohesion. Through his writings, speeches, and activism, he advocated for the integration of historic preservation into urban planning policies, emphasizing the need for sustainable development and the protection of the built environment. This paper also discusses some of the key initiatives led by Ragghianti, including his involvement in the restoration of several historic cities in Italy. Furthermore, it highlights the lasting impact of Ragghianti's ideas and his legacy in the field of heritage conservation, inspiring subsequent generations of scholars, professionals, and policymakers to adopt a holistic approach towards the preservation of historic cities.

The decade between 1950 and 1960 is decisive in many aspects of Fernando Távora’s design and cultural career: his entry as a lecturer at the Escolas de Belas-Artes in Porto (ESBAP), his participation in the CIAM, a series of trips that were decisive for his education, among which the “journey around the world” financed by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon stands out, the realisation of founding works such as the Quinta da Conceição in Matosinhos, the Municipal Market in Vila da Feira, the Holiday House in Ofir as well as an intense activity as an urban planner, independently or in collaboration with the Municipality of Porto. The text intends to retrace the writings about the city elaborated during that period, showing their evolution—from the approach to the historical European city to the encounter with the great non-European metropolises—emphasising the methodological aspects that later became central to his idea of the architectural and urban project.

This paper describes the Public History activities carried out by the Historical Documentation Centre of Turins’s 5th Borough (CDS) in Vallette, a stigmatised council estate in Turin. The Centre, which is a Council organisation made of voluntary researchers mostly resident in the area, has been working in the estate since 2008. Their activities, which aim to “rediscover” Vallette’s history, are based on Public History, intended as platform for historical democratisation. The key idea is the “sharing authority” which allows the local community, not just professional historians, to produce its own historical knowledge. As we will show, Public History could be used not only as powerful tool to tackle negative narratives endured by the estate, but also as a catalyst to promote stronger resident participation and activism in a wider project of urban regeneration and social revitalisation.

The Piano settoriale per il centro storico di Bologna (1962–1965) coordinated by Leonardo Benevolo was part of the studies for the Piano regolatore intercomunale promoted by Giuseppe Campos Venuti (1926–2019), town planning councillor for the Municipality of Bologna. The aim of this study was the knowledge of the material and immaterial characteristics of the ancient city for the conception of subsequent detailed plans. The “risanamento conservativo”, indicated by Benevolo as the main instrument for the preservation of the ancient city, was also understood as a tool for the conservation of the social network that characterised the identity of this part of the city.

The paper deals with the analysis of the case study of the plan for the historical center of Bologna (1969), and especially on how the municipality succeeded in building the general consensus to the plan and its success, operating on the physical and social structures by involving participation, photography, and traffic avoidance. Those will be considered vectors that enhanced the construction of an urban imaginary, useful both for the social and political aims that intertwined in the plan.

The second Symposium of the European Program of Exemplary Achievements on the “Social Cost of Integrated Conservation of Historic Centers,” organized in Bologna in 1974, is an opportunity to be able to sketch some notes on the public intervention plan for services in the city of Bologna.

The Centro Storico Office in Ancona, established in the mid-1970s following the earthquake that struck the city in 1972, was confronted with a long series of critical urban issues that had remained unresolved since the bombing during the Second World War. The young designers lived through a particularly lively phase in the Marche capital’s urban and architectural history, characterised in particular from an urban planning point of view by the regulatory plans coordinated in the 1950s by Giovanni Astengo and in the 1970s by Giuseppe Campos Venuti. In addition to these two internationally renowned planners, many architects who worked on the different sections of the historic centre in Ancona in those years, even if not always with realised projects, found space in the city. From the early seventies, in the Guasco-San Pietro and Capodimonte neighbourhoods, there was a succession of philological restoration works, coordinated in particular by the local officials of the Cultural Heritage Agency, with projects characterised by extremely modern languages that were inserted in a sometimes contrasting way in some of the oldest areas of the city of Ancona.

The historic center of Naples, with its 1021 ha on the UNESCO World Heritage List, is one of the largest, oldest, and most studied ones in Europe. Its extension, however, is the result of a lengthy process that has given rise, over time, to debates and disputes. From 1964 to nowadays it has been addressed by numerous proposals for intervention, some more operational other more general, aimed at defining regulations or management guidelines. However, few restoration projects have been carried out in the last decades, excluding the construction sites opened thanks to the Grande Progetto UNESCO Centro Storico di Napoli, began in 2009 and still ongoing. The result is the paradox that an exceptional set of values, accompanied by a growing tourist demand, is matched by a condition of degradation that has few comparisons in Europe, with social, economic, and structural problems of centuries-old origin still awaiting effective solutions. The objective of this study is to present a summary of approximately half a century of debates and proposals for interventions, accompanied in the last fifteen years by a more intense - although not always effective - management activity of the site, pointing out lights and shadows and outlining possible and future scenarios. The main focus is the ancient center, wherein the millenary stratification of the city persists. In this way, it will be possible to look at the city of Naples as a paradigm of the evolution of urban restoration in Italy spanning six decades of debate.

With respect to the extensive debate about the conservation of historic centers that characterized the 1950s and 1960s in Italy, this paper aims to shed light on the results of the almost unknown 1967 conference on the ancient center of Salerno, Campania’s second largest city with Roman and Lombard origins. Promoted by the Demochristian municipal administration led by Alfonso Menna and intended as the first local attempt to participate in the debate, the meeting can fully enter the list of the most interesting experiences on the national scene, involving various protagonists of the coeval political and cultural Italian milieu. As a result, the significant reflections on the conservation of the old town that came out of the conference were given the form of a proper operative model, which resulted in a competition for a detailed plan for Salerno historic center in 1968, later entrusted to a team coordinated by Paolo Portoghesi.

This contribution traces the global dissemination of Leonardo Benevolo’s work during the 1970s, notably focusing on the consulting work for UNDP/UNESCO carried out in Latin America by Benevolo and his younger colleague, Giorgio Lombardi. The Italian architect and architectural historian was one of the most important spokesmen for the Italian policies on the protection of historical cities in the 1960s and 1970s. His methodology of intervention for the rehabilitation of historic urban areas met with great interest internationally and quickly became a model for architects and planners worldwide and, in particular, for large international organizations. The essay investigates how Benevolo’s approach to the preservation of historical centres was received and used in Latin America. In doing so, it suggests that while the technical aspects became a working reference for the whole region and beyond, Benevolo’s theoretical framework that considered the preservation of historic districts the first step for an alternative model of modern city development was largely marginalized.

In 2006, in coincidence with the opening of the Winter Olympic Games, Turin’s Egyptian Museum promoted the construction of a plastic sphinx—a magnified version of a piece of its collection—to be placed in a highly visible peripheral location of the city. Moving from the premise that the microanalytical study of seemingly marginal objects can shed a revealing light on processes of urban transformation, the paper discusses this sphinx as a testimony of the paradoxical entanglement of objects and temporalities that characterize neoliberal cities. Observed from the perspective of the public use of the past, the sphinx offers interesting clues for interrogating a historical phase in which institutions seem to have placed memory at the center of their urban regeneration strategies—only to easily lose the memory of their own actions. Observed from the perspective of its materiality, the sphinx shows to what extent post-industrial narratives are deeply rooted in the entanglement of actors and practices of the industrial city.

Urban culture can once again become an instrument of city transformation thanks to the tourist attractiveness of cities of culture, after cultural policies have avoided that ancillary and passive role attributed by city governments justifying the increasingly stunted funding for reasons of economic crisis. However, the risks of relying only on actions capable of activating economic processes palatable to the entrepreneurial system are now emerging, to the benefit of real estate rent, operating within a logic more of patronage than of activating creative entrepreneurship by pushing public and private investment mainly in the direction of the event often subservient to financial logics. Our idea is that the cultural event of Matera European Capital of Culture 2019, in light of the transformations that occurred during its journey from the candidacy to the proclamation of European Capital of Culture 2019, has interpreted the cultural process as a policy of urban regeneration by trying to question how urban planning can become regenerative through a cultural policy. Liberating the imaginary and symbolic values of its heritages, Matera has tried to put the utopias and dystopias of its past back into tension in dialogue with the discontinuities of the future, helping to overcome the logic of major events and the uncertainties of the future in order to return to making Matera a laboratory city, as it had been in the days of Adriano Olivetti, Ludovico Quaroni, Carlo Aymonino and Giancarlo De Carlo (These reflections were reported in part in the text (Mininni in Osservare Matera. Cultura, cittadinanza e spazio. Quodlibet, Macerata, 2021 [1])).