Università Roma Tre

Talking about urban renewal is an opportunity to know, protect, recover and therefore enhance the rich heritage of households, quarters and cities that form the majority of urban contexts in which we live.
An historical centre, in particular, is a territorial context extremely delicate, place of collective and individual memories, with a distinct urban identity and a high historical value referable both to the urban structure and to the individual buildings, including those of significant value. Any planning action concerning an historical centre is therefore complex because "it is about, in the first place, to know it and recognize it, so as to understand its characteristics - spatial, documentary, functional - that identify it" (G.Piccinato, 2008).
It is therefore necessary to understand, on the one hand, its territorial role but also, and above all, the vision that its inhabitants and users have (“who does the historic centre belong to?”).
The course aims at providing the elements of the discipline, methodology and technique to intervene in those urban areas, historical and not, identified since 1978 by the law 457, which introduced the instrument of the recovery plan. This also and especially in the light of the evolution that the instrument had over the years and the current urban dynamics, ever more interested in the recovery of the existing urban areas.
The course will be divided in the following four parts, strictly related:
1. recovery planning: the scientific background and evolution of the disciplinary debate
In this part the scientific context of urban renewal ("what we talk about?") in the field of the urban planning regulations will be defined and will run the history of the disciplinary debate that, since the Fifties, addressed urban contexts, and later even those degraded both in terms physical and social, will be studied.
2. legislation and planning instruments
This part will analyse the texts of laws affecting the intervention on historical contexts, and in general on the existing building and urban structures, and related planning instruments, from the Recovery Plan (Art. 27 of Law 457 of 1978), up to the integrated programs of the nineties.
3. techniques
The study of the techniques of interventions in historical contexts will make use of the analyses of recovery plans and detailed plans of town centres, checking out the objectives, contents, technical procedures, the procedural issues and, finally, the story of implementation.
4. a practical exercise
Simultaneously with the theoretical disciplinary component, the study of a portion of a historical urban context will be addressed to set up an integrated strategy of recovery and valorisation, which will include the Recovery Plan, the Mobility Plan, the Public Works Program, the socio-economic feasibility study, and identify related urban policies and participatory planning mechanisms.

Mario Cerasoli, Gianluca Mattarocci (a cura di), Rigenerazione urbana e mercato immobiliare. Roma : RomaTrE-Press, 2018
Cerasoli, M., & Mattarocci, G. (a cura di). (2020). Un futuro per i centri storici minori. Scenari possibili nell'era post-covid. Roma : Aracne Editrice.
Ravagnan, C. & Amato, C., Percorsi di resilienza. Rilancio e riuso delle ferrovie in dismissione nei territori fragili tra Italia e Spagna. Roma : Aracne, 2020