During the 2022 spring semester, we spent our seminar week in the Italian city of Naples. We immersed ourselves in the micro stories that are reshaping the abandoned spaces of the city thanks to the tenacity and passion of interdependent communities. A growing network of citizens has undertaken collective actions by making accessible neglected public areas and buildings, including former monasteries, a hospital, and a majestic villa that overlooks the sea.

Referring to themselves as ‘

’, the network represents the idea that publicly-owned buildings and (public) spaces in the city should be considered collectively owned and serve the entire community, similar to other commons, such as natural resources (air, water, soil) and cultural heritage. With their acts of what they call “civic disobedience” – or what could also be seen as civic responsibility – they started a dialogue with local institutions and have been recognized by the Municipality of Naples as part of the fundamental values of the city.

Associations and actors of the network of commons introduced us to the management and maintenance of several ‘liberated’ spaces. The stories of the liberated spaces offered us a lens through which we started to rethink such concepts as democracy, commoning, agency, reuse and care in the urban environment. How do architects position themselves in this context? What role does design play in revealing and unlocking the transformative potential of these spaces?

Introduction

Naples is the third most populous city in Italy, after Rome and Milan. It is the capital city of the Campania Region. Characterised by urban sprawl, and with poverty concentrated in the central area of the city (rather than in the periphery as is the case in Milan and Rome), over the past decade the City of Naples decided to invest in the reuse of heritage in the historic center, or Centro Storico. Simultaneously, grassroots movements started to emerge as guardians of the the common good. Many people were mobilized by the news that toxic waste had been dumped by the local Camorra crime syndicate for decades and had contaminated crucial water supplies.

Naples’ journey to the urban commons took off in 2012 with the informal management of a former convent called ‘Asilo Filangieri’, a monumental building in the city centre owned by the City of Naples. The community that started the informal management of the space was composed mostly of artists who opposed the high unemployment and precarious working conditions of the cultural sector. Rather than conceiving the building of the Asilo Filangieri as simply an ‘occupied space’, occupants started seeing it as a common. They transformed it into a cultural and arts centre and made means of production (for example theatre stages, crafts material) free and accessible to all.

The process culminated in 2016, with the ratification of a new resolution by the City of Naples, which enabled other public spaces to adopt the civic use model of L'Asilo and be declared as ‘emerging urban commons’. In addition to the Asilo Filangieri, in fact, seven public proprieties were recognised by the City Council of Naples as “relevant civic spaces to be ascribed to the category of urban commons”: Ex-Convento delle Teresiane; Giardino Liberato; Lido Pola; Villa Medusa; Ex-OPG di Materdei; Ex-Carcere Minorile – Scugnizzo Liberato; Ex Conservatorio S. Maria della Fede; Ex- Scuola Schipa. Since then, more spaces have been 'liberated'.


Context

During the week, we explored different case studies of social activities that transformed the urban spaces of Naples. We visited different commons that are part of the “

” network. Additionally, we looked at similar projects of other groups of people who regenerated abandoned places and transformed them into spaces for social activities, exhibitions, and historical knowledge. All these different spaces and processes have been able to reactivate entire neighbourhoods. As catalysts of collective energies, these urban interventions reacted to a state of decline of both local heritage and communities and found solutions to cooperate and mobilise for change. Through interviews, guided walks, workshops, discussions and other forms of engagement we gained knowledge about the history and future plans of these commons.

Day 1 – During the first day we visited Scugnizzo Liberato and L’Asilo (, two of the commons of Naples. Convento delle Cappuccinelle, originally founded in 1585, was turned into a youth detention centre in the 1800s. Currently, it is home to an urban regeneration project named ‘Scugnizzo Liberato’, meaning ‘Freed street boy’ (more info 

). The project was initiated by the occupation of the building by Sacco Matto, a citizens collective aimed at filling empty urban spaces with a social purpose. Scugnizzo Liberato is managed based on radical open democratic principles. During the evening, we participated in the weekly assembly of 

: an independent centre for artistic, social and cultural production, run by an informal community of artists, activists, researchers and (other) citizens.

is an urban regeneration project in the Spanish Quarters of Naples, a disinvested area characterized by precariousness and urban degradation. Based in the former Montecalvario Institute, this private initiative houses a.o. a rehabilitation center for the mentally challenged, several schools, a gym, gallery space and restaurant. During the afternoon, we met with several actors of the network of the Commons Napoli at the 

Department of Architecture, University of Naples Federico II

. In the evening, we met with the collective of artists “Demanding the impossible” at L’Asilo.

Day 3 – We started the third day with a discussion at L’Asilo on “Sowing common goods. Civic and collective uses, environment, right to the city” with the participation of representatives of the Municipality of Naples. During the afternoon, we wandered around the city looking for traces of the commons. In the evening, students took part in the thematic table discussions at L’Asilo, one of the formats in place to promote participation and facilitate the self-governance of this urban common.

Day 4 – In the morning we drove to the outskirts of the city to visit 

 and Villa Medusa, two commons along the Mediterranean coast in the Bagnoli district, and meet with some of the people behind these initiatives. After a workshop session at L’Asilo in the afternoon, we walked around the old city center and visited the 

, an exhibition space and performative art center. Situated in the former Santa Caterina a Formiello convent, it was in a state of total abandonment and was used as an indoor car park, before it was repurposed and renovated in dialogue with the neighborhood.

Day 5 – Rione Sanità is a district of Naples known for its small street markets; we visited it with people from the 

, who took the initiative to open up the Catacombs of San Gennaro. an underground paleo-Christian burial and worship site in Naples. We spent the afternoon preparing for the final event, which took place at L’Asilo in the evening. On this occasion, students shared their observations and group conversations in the form of a series of performances - or role plays. We were joined by people we had met during the week.

Day 6 – On the final day we visited the island of Procida, one of the Phlegraean Islands off the coast of Naples. As Italy’s ‘Capitale della Cultura 2022’, or Capital of Culture, the island hosted a vast programme of public cultural events. We engaged with the local community by participating in the “la coperta della pace” (the blanket of peace) march against the war in Ukraine. The peace blanket, about forty meters long, was made by over one hundred women from about thirty associations in the Lagonegro area and beyond.


Programme

[Studio team] Marica Castigliano, Natassa Dourida, Ellena Ehrl, Michiel van Iersel, Freek Persyn

[Students] Tommaso Aliverti, Helen Bangerter, Alessandro Canonica, Federico Cigolini, Sarina Costanzo, Lucia Giacobbi, Cheryne Götz, Andri Heini, Noé Herrli, Aleksandar Ilic , Mario Kündig, Mona Lecoultre, Christian Peterhans, Danny Sahan, Giacomo Sarra, Insa Streit, Chloe Szwarc, Lucas Tanner, Fiona Wagner, Leon Weissheimer

Special thanks to everyone we met and who helped us navigate and understand the urban commons and cultural life of Naples, including the kind people of L’Asilo - Ex Asilo Filangieri, Scugnizzo Liberato, Ex OPG Occupato - Je so’ pazzo, Lido Pola, Villa Medusa – Casa del Popolo, Commons Napoli, University of Naples Federico II, FOQUS Foundation, Made in Cloister Foundation, La Paranza (Cooperative of Rione Sanità and Catacombe di Napoli), Procida - Italian Capital of Culture 2022.


Credits

Seminar Weeks

Seminar Week Naples – Commoning Urban Transformation

In 2019, Freek Persyn wrote this letter to share the news of his inauguration as a professor at ETH Zurich

I am writing to tell you that last January I have been appointed as professor at ETH Zurich, to run a studio and develop research. It feels like a major challenge, as I will spend the next 20 years or so, until my retirement, in that capacity. It sounds like an incredible amount of time. Especially when you compare it to the 10 years some people say are left to change our impact on the environment we depend upon. We are forced to redefine how we understand comfort and growth. I find it hard to do: I somehow cannot imagine my life changing so drastically the next 10 years. Can you picture what would need to change?

When starting in Zurich, the first thing I did was to change the name of the professorship. Instead of Architecture & Urban Design, I called it Architecture & Urban Transformation. It is about looking closely at existing urban environments and imagining how they could play a different role, or how we ourselves could start using them differently. In light of the challenges mentioned above, it will be as much about changing spaces as it will be about changing practices and cultures of collaborating and communicating.

Being part of the practice 51N4E I have worked across Europe, from Belgium to Albania, and now I will land in Switzerland. I find it an intriguing place, that quietly and steadily works on changing itself, combining conservation and innovation. It feels appropriate to work here on architecture as a process that connects different points of views and transforms them, ideally to exceed the expectations of everyone involved, including yourself. Starting from this country in the middle of Europe, I want to rediscover this territory as a part of the world with a fertile future, through an open program called NEWROPE.

I will have to confront all of these ambitions with a half-time position, with one foot in the university and another in practice. Just like all other members of the NEWROPE team, who all come from different disciplines and cultures, we are forced to be bridge figures. As such, we are already the embodiment of what we want to teach, research and develop. I look forward to do this within a university that is known to be an ecosystem of both knowledge and action.

Yesterday night, we finished installing the Design in Dialogue Lab, our social studio space in the ONA building in Oerlikon, in the north of Zurich. It felt like a great moment, the energy of so many people coming together and getting things done. You should come and see it, as I think you will like it. We can show you what we will be working on and I am curious to hear and see your reaction. And whenever you visit us, I promise you will be warmly welcomed, with good coffee.

Letter

Launching NEWROPE

Following Studio Piraeus, the NEWROPE team wrote this letter to revisit the observations and thoughts inspired by a semester of intensive involvement with Piraeus alongside the students

We hope this letter finds you well in these tumultuous times. We are writing you to share some ideas, insights and questions that kept us busy during the last few months. It is an attempt to stay in touch and start an exchange, despite the ongoing, forced, physical distance. With our team we are rediscovering cities and territories across Europe as complex and interconnected parts of the world. This spring a group of highly motivated students joined our design studio. Through a combination of fieldwork and online communication we have been developing ideas for the Greek port city of Piraeus.

Due to its historical and geopolitical relevance, situated at the nexus of major flows of people and goods between Europe and the Middle East, we see in Piraeus many of the paradoxes and potentials of what we call Newrope. Positioned at the crossroads of economic, political, social and cultural developments, Piraeus can serve as a cautionary tale of a city, and a continent, that is slowly torn by diverging global and local forces. The 2013 International Monetary Fund bailout plan forced Greece to privatize a large number of its national assets. As a result, state-owned Chinese shipping company COSCO gained majority shares over the port of Piraeus in 2017. This acquisition is part of the so-called Belt and Road Initiative, a global development strategy adopted by the Chinese government involving infrastructure projects and investments all around the world.

The fact that residential neighborhoods are not visible on the recently approved master plan for the port’s future development is indicative of the growing tension between COSCO’s global ambitions and local needs. At the same time the city is struggling with a series of other challenges, from the ongoing financial (debt) crisis and the influx of refugees to the impact of climate change and large-scale infrastructure projects on urban life. Starting from this place where land and water meet and together shape the silhouette of Europe, we wanted to understand how foreign investors, local residents and others can collectively benefit from the proposed transformation of the port area. Moving beyond binaries and blurring the boundaries between ‘us’ and ‘them’, students developed concrete interventions that bring people with conflicting views and interests into dialogue.

By looking at Piraeus from different perspectives and across scales, in close collaboration with locals, we tried to embrace the rich diversity and ‘messy vitality’ of this contested city. The proposals range from large-scale developments to small-scale grassroots initiatives and from speculative infrastructural projects to concrete architectural interventions, business proposals and public campaigns. We would like to invite you to take a look at the proposals and read more about Piraeus and Newrope on the Studio Piraeus blog: www.newropepiraeus.world. On the reverse side of this letter you will find a series of stills from films that photographer Maxime Delvaux shot in and around Piraeus, accompanied by short texts. Hopefully it will give you food for thought and trigger a response.

Looking forward to hear from you and wishing you the best, on behalf of the Newrope team,

Charlotte Schaeben
Lukas Fink
Michiel van Iersel“

[Authors] Lukas Fink, Charlotte Schaeben, Michiel van Iersel

Reflections on Piraeus

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