Published 2021
| Version v1
Publication
Necessity and legitimacy of demolitions as strategy for conservation. Reflections on twentieth and twenty-first century heritage
Description
On the first day of September 2020, just one month after the inauguration of
the new vehicular bridge designed by Renzo Piano in Genoa, the mayor of the city
announced a new urban regeneration programme for the historic centre. «In a couple
of weeks we will present the urban regeneration project. We will work on the ancient
buildings using the "demolition strategy" (to preserve and enhance architectural and
urban heritage). We are confronting with other Institutions to understand where it is
possible to demolish creating new small squares and where demolish to re-build».
This is not the first time that the public administration, which is in charge of
the management of one of the more dense historical centres of Europe, addressed
the problem of demolition. Previous Town planning Councillors, when renovation of
the ancient city appeared a strategy of economic and social growth (late '80s and
beginning '90s), invoked demolition as a strategy to regenerate and preserve the old
city. Bruno Gabrielli, at the end of the last millennium, dared to make the proposal
to demolish buildings built after the bombs (ww2), whose architectural characters
were in dissonance with traditional ones. And, before him, on the occasion of the
five hundredth anniversary of the discovery of America (1992), the Town planning
Councillor relaunched an old idea of demolishing the loggias to "restore" the hypothetical
medieval image of the city, starting from the Ripa maris.
Additional details
Identifiers
- URL
- https://hdl.handle.net/11567/1068441
- URN
- urn:oai:iris.unige.it:11567/1068441