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Urban Wastelands:

restoration or preservation?

Rovereto: Restoring building while preserving nature. A legible layer in the post-industrial space palimpsest.

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Most cities around the world include spaces that are in an abandoned or in a temporarily indeterminate state. They can be “… smaller and more widespread, almost invisible spaces: abandoned industrial areas where brambles and brushwood grow…” (Clement 2004) and can be viewed as Wastelands with multiple histories and origins (Lawton et al. 2019, 216). Closed down factories and utilities, run down and abandoned commercial and residential plots could be Urban Wastelands, rejected from the transformation process and development of the territory as a result of a capitalist society. “Under capitalism, natures become increasingly enrolled in the circuits of capital accumulation through which they are both transformed and de-/re-territorialized.” (Swyngedouw 2015, 613)  What I want to emphasize is that nature can be alternated with the built environment, without necessarily deciding which landscape will be maintained and which restored, but it is a continuous succession of actions that sometimes will privilege one and sometimes the other, in the desire to continue to add levels to the palimpsest of the area to value what is in. The metaphor of palimpsest is often used to “emphasise iconographic spaces by preserving locations and monuments to the point of ‘freezing’ the landscape, or by promoting the adaptive reuse of spaces and buildings” (Bartolini 2014, 521).

In order to try to understand the role spontaneous vegetation can have in the future and how it could be valued, I evaluated what was the role that it has played over the centuries. Against the thesis “The politics of preservation and restoration short circuit the radical possibilities of producing nature, authorizing instead, a privatized rescripting of nature” (Katz 2005, 56) and show that is possible to have a requalification in an urban public area, I chose a site in the North of Italy, in Rovereto. The choice of the area was born from the need to be able to analyze a site familiar to me even without the possibility to physically visit it, because of the limitations caused by the global pandemic of spring 2020. It consists of an industrial abandoned area on the border of a little city of 40.000  inhabitants (comune di Rovereto, 2019,4) that is very important for the people who live in smaller villages around.

history of the city and site

Rovereto is a little town in the north-east of Italy. It has been an important crossroads for goods and people from Italy to Austria, as it is located at the beginning of the valley that crosses the border region: Trentino Alto Adige. This region was Austrian until the end of World War I, and, while being in an agricultural region, the relationship between industrialised city and nature has been one of the main elements of the urban identity of Rovereto. (Gatti 2002) Between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a quality product came out of the spinning machines and found unanimous appreciation. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, the Rovereto silk factory is going into decline and local businesses are unable to react, so the public authority intervenes in favour of the manufacturing relaunch.  During the period between World War I and II, the local people continued with the old productions, without innovations, as mills, pasta factories and sawmills. The innovations and factories with more technology, like a light bulb factory, a chemical fertiliser factory and mechanical weaving mills, were brought in by new residents, attracted with facilitation promoted by the municipality. During the 1960s, the industry started to develop, but it couldn’t provide work to everyone that came from agricultural backgrounds. (Bonoldi 2002)

The considered area consists of two distinct zones crossed in the middle by an important connecting road that divides an area used for industrial development from the other that, after having had an attempted development, was never completed and has remained abandoned. In 2016, The Merloni Termosanitari Spa, the last part of the factory that was still working with their offices and production in the built area, closed. Thus confirming the definitive abandonment of the industrial area in decline for some time. Merloni was the last passage of Officine Radi, settled in Rovereto in 1927 because of the engineer Serafino Radi, who came to this city after the World War I. It was a peripheral area, far enough away from the city centre that was starting to expand. His production of lamps is complemented by the production of the started to make electrical water heaters. This was a novelty and it gave the company notoriety, as well as wide market penetration. In the 1960s there were changes in employees' working conditions. First, the weekly hours were reduced, but then the company passed into the hands of the Reheem multinational. Another change came in 1985 when the Merloni S.p.a. became the owner of the factory. The following thirty years were a succession of prosperous and less flourishing periods for the company that led it to reduce production more and more, progressively abandoning industrial buildings until its final closure in 2016 with Ariston brand. (Lando 2016)

PRESENT CONDITION OF THE SITE

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Rovereto is a city full of “ex-es”. A city which has to contend with the remains of its more or less recent past, ex-Tobacco Factory, ex-Meccatronica, ex-Peterlini, ex-Alpe, these are just a few of the buildings which once defined the structure of a city intent on industrial production. (Rizzi 2012)

The area analyzed is part of the Rovereto urban regeneration plan for 2020 (INU 2020), where the area has been presented as a part of buildings that are in a state of neglect for years. On the one hand, they represent situations of abnormal degradation compared to the high urban quality of Rovereto, but on the other, they could become potential activators of urban regeneration. In the recent past, the city has mainly benefited from public investment for important facilities, like the museum of modern and contemporary art (MART) or restoration of old buildings to be used as new spaces for the university. The redevelopment along the Brenner axis, (main street highlighted on the map) will have to make use mainly of private investments, which the municipal administration intends to direct towards town planning objectives of public interest. To this end, the Administration has activated various forms of interaction and collaboration with the properties. The forms of collaboration and the objectives that can be pursued have different connotations in relation to the specific characteristics of each property and of the real estate complex involved. (INU 2020)

REGENERATION of THE SITE

The site is abandoned. "Abandoned industrial buildings are characterized by a fragile image which makes them unworthy"(Vigliocco 2013); however, they maintain quality and potentiality that can be explored by new solutions and strategies of intervention, maintaining latent energy that can be reactivated by new strategies of reuse.

Why could the site be considered a wasteland? To refute the thesis that spontaneous vegetation is part only of ruins, I want to emphasize the presence of this type of nature, maintaining the high level of biodiversity that, as Matthew Gandy says, in the city is higher than anywhere else (Gandy 2018, 101). In this way it will develop a new layer that will not be totally distinguishable from the previous one and will bring homogeneity in two different urban areas straddling the road that has always been treated differently, giving voice to a nature that has permitted only to bring poetry to the ruins. It is “A hotch-potch of green blankets the outer grounds of ruins, gradually creeping into spaces where light and space permit growth, progressively blurring the distinctions between inside and outside.” (Edensor 2005, 43) 

To have a higher perception of a space in which to move freely in order to create more continuity between inside and outside and transform an urban ruin in a public space, with some interventions built by the city and leased with a subsidy to local producers. In order to introduce the idea that a wasteland does not necessarily equal danger, the roof of the existing building will be removed. Additionally, as the roof has not been maintained and has fallen in at some points, it will be removed as to not endanger others. It will be reused to produce a sort of “path of history”, where now there is only an uncultivated and unused land, fenced and unused except to leave a meaningless space between the built environments. Some parts of the roof will be placed in the wasteland field on the other side of the street along the ways that pass in the middle of the field, that will become a green area introducing some paths, to tell anyone who uses this, what has been the past of this place and to produce recycled art. Everything returns to a public space as always been in the historical perspective. In order to maintain the idea inside-outside will be highlight a part of the processes that have brought this place from having a luxuriant nature that produced fruit to being destroyed in order to build industries that, like all things that man produces, at the end of its use, he disposes of it, in this case abandoning it and handing it over to nature that has reproduced on itself the effects of a romantic aesthetics of the ruins.

“For many, ruins would seem to be dangerous places, and the fear related to such concerns preclude many from entering” (Edensor 2005, 17) and as a result, people don't like this kind of vegetation, they think it is just a disease bearer, like mold, but there are some examples where nature in all its forms and buildings coexist together. We see from the point of view of this restoration-preservation to reproduce what has been the natural cycle of vegetation and all the habitat around it so that an abandoned site is not intended as a place of wasteland, a hole in the city, but as a link between the opposite parts of the living world: living in the building, living in the open air.

In order to maintain life within this site and not to forget its history, but to re-purpose it in a sustainable productive way, small structures to accommodate who take care of the site, will be built within this huge space formerly used as a factory.  A hybrid space in which to enhance nature as it comes, care for what's left of the old factory and preserve it. The inhabitants will be people who tend to cultivate spontaneous vegetation for herbs (Taraxacum officinale, hops, aromatic and medicinal herbs, etc.) to the old factory and the other plot and their buildings will be their laboratory, office and a showroom, where they would dry and process the herbs, experiment with them and sell products. The factory building is passing from private property to the city-owned, so leasing out small scale production could pay for the removal of the roof and it's relocation as well as paying for all requalification costs to make the place habitable. 

Something of this kind cannot be sustained forever in time. I want to reflect the transience of nature in the transience of the built environment. “The botanical colonisation of derelict land and buildings is not a static process but changes over time depending upon the longevity of the abandoned site.” (Edensor 2005, 43) This place will be adaptable and flexible to changing needs over time, without forgetting the aesthetic beauty of abandonment: “…picturesque is therefore sought in ruin, and supposed to consist in decay. Whereas, even when so sought, it consists in the mere sublimity of the rents, or fractures, or stains, or vegetation, which assimilate the architecture with the work of Nature, and bestow upon it those circumstances of colour and form which are universally beloved by the eye of man”(Ruskin, 1849)

References (Texts)

Bartolini, Nadia. 2014. Critical urban heritage: from palimpsest to brecciation, International Journal of Heritage Studies, 20:5, 519-533

 

Bonoldi, Andrea. 2002. "Imprenditoria privata e intervento pubblico tra le due guerre" in Mario Allegri (a cura di), Rovereto in Italia: dall'irredentismo agli anni del fascismo (1890-1939), Rovereto: Accademia Roveretana degli Agiati, p.167-186

 

Katz, Cindi. 2005 [1998]. “Whose Nature, Whose Culture? Private Productions of Space and the ‘Preservation’ of Nature” in

Remaking Reality: Nature at the Millenium edited by Braun, B. and N. Castree, 45–62. London: Routledge.

 

Comune di Rovereto (TN). 2019. La città in cifre, Annuario Statistico Demografico

 

Edensor, Tim. 2005. Industrial Ruins: Space, Aesthetics And Materiality. Berg Publishers

 

Gandy, Matthew. 2018. "Cities in Deep Time." City 22 1: 96–106

 

Gatti, Maria Paola. 2002. "Da borgo a città. L’evoluzione novecentesca di Rovereto - To village a city. The twentieth century evolution of Rovereto" in Memorie Accademia Roveretana degli Agiati a. 252, ser. II vol. V, t.II, Rovereto (TN): Osiride, p. 403-426

 

Gilles, Clément 2004. Manifesto del terzo paesaggio. Quodlibet

 

Lando, Mauro. 2016. “Ariston, l’addio dopo quasi 90 anni”. Trentino. https://www.giornaletrentino.it/cronaca/trento/ariston-l-addio-dopo-quasi-90-anni-1.688753#

Lawton,Philip Till,Karen E. Jasper,Sandra Vasudevan,Alexander  Dümpelmann,Sonja Flitner,Michael  Beach,Matthew  Nash,Catherine Gandy, Matthew  (2019) Natura Urbana: The Brachen of Berlin, The AAG Review of Books, 7:3, 214-227,

 

INU (istituto nazionale di urbanistica). Rovereto 2020: piano d’azione per la rigenerazione urbana, https://rassegna.inu.it/gallery/rovereto-2020-piano-dazione-per-la-rigenerazione-urbana/

 

Rizzi, Chiara. 2012. Manufacturing tomorrow in Rovereto, “Green factories of the future” in Eco Web Town Magazine of Sustainable Design Edizione SCUT, Università Chieti-Pescara N° 4, Agosto

 

Ruskin, John. 1849. The Seven Lamps of Architecture Lectures on Architecture and Painting The Study of Architecture Boston Dana Estes & Company Publishers

 

Swyngedouw, Erik. 2015. Urbanization and environmental futures: Politicizing urban political ecologies. in Handbook of Political Ecology edited by T. Perrault, G.  Bridge, and J. McCarty, 609–619. London: Routledge

 

Vigliocco, Elena. 2013. Riciclare    l’architettura:l’archeologia    industriale e i    parchi dicemento/Recycling   architecture:industrial   archeology   and   concrete   parks. In:LABOR & ENGENHOn. 1, pp. 1-17. 

 

References (Maps)

INU (istituto nazionale di urbanistica). Rovereto 2020: piano d’azione per la rigenerazione urbana

 

Filippi, Ezio. 1993.  Rovereto: contributi per una nuova ricerca di geografia urbana.  - In: Atti dell'Accademia Roveretana degli Agiati A Ser. 7, vol. 3 (1993) p. 137-179

 

Servizio urbanistica e tutela del paesaggio provincia trento

Openkat provincia di trento, Rovereto, cc IM242 

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