The Porosity of the Purgatory

Abstract

Among the many cities that lost their status of capital with the Italian unification, Naples is the one that struggled the most to reconcile with its past. With the cholera outbreak of 1874 the criticalities of centuries of uncontrolled urban development under foreign kings rose to the fore of the public opinion of the Kingdom of Italy. Yet, for the following decades until nowadays, institutions and politicians failed in providing an integrated vision for the city that could give it a new inclusive identity. Instead, lack of dialogue, path dependency among stakeholders and scarce involvement of communities served the interests of a weak entrepreneurial class and extremized the social problems of the old capital.
King Ferdinando II and Francesco II of Bourbon, the last royals of Naples, saw in the geographical position of the South of Italy the protection of their power: as they liked to say, the peninsula was confining with the salty water of the Mediterranean Sea toward south and the Holy water of the Vatican state up north (Astarita, 2006). This image not only reflected the attitude of the monarchs in international affairs, but it also reveals the two major constraints that have hampered the Neapolitan urban development: a problematic relationship with the sea and the unwillingness to open to a diverse liberal society.
What had grown in between these two limits, was what Walter Benjamin and Asja Lacis would have referred to as the Porous city (Benjamin, Lacis, 1925). When the two visited Naples in 1925 found an obstinately antimodern city where the people had the same consistence of the stone that constituted its walls and that, in its rejection of dichotomies, was a distant alternative to the rational northern European cities which the authors were so used to. According to their description, the urban environment of the Parthenopean city was extremely promiscuous: families from different social extractions used to share the same ancient buildings and attend the same squares, where a crowded market poured into the street in a continuous swarm of praises and trades, that could only be broken open by the sudden passage of a religious procession.
Since then, this image lived a life of its own, having a profound impact on the imaginary of urbanists and planners across the world and reoccurring in different forms in the speeches and texts of researchers over the last seventy years. Most notably, the Italian duo Bernardo Secchi and Paola Viganò reinterpreted this concept in their work for the city of Antwerp in 2009 (Secchi, Viganò, 2009). The two urbanists, in fact, would later explain how the theme of porosity does not only concern the material quality of the buildings but rather more the different ways through which different city users appropriate the space. As such, porosity allows for diversity in the urban environment maximizing social and economic interaction (Tallen, 2008), thus enabling kinship network, the system of formal and informal relationships that make up a community to be active and thriving.
But what is left of the porosity of Naples? Since the end of the XIX century, having by then lost the role of capital, the city had to go under a much-needed process of reinvention and even if originally Naples had to be a maritime city, the foreign rulers, especially during the two centuries before the Italian unification, never developed the full potentiality of the port (Di Mauro, 2006). Under the new regime instead, the Neapolitan elite class rediscovered the sea in its potential for the industrial development. Following logic of economic efficiency and rationality led to new patterns of expansion and consumption of land (Ascher, 2001) and the insalubrious territories, once considered the limit to urban expansion, became the desirable location for the new Industrial city. The old walls of the city where gradually demolished and the city began its expansion towards east in the Borgo Loreto, the marshy delta of the Sebeto river and the, at the time separate, town of San Giovanni a Teduccio. These Bad lands (Secchi, 2006) were necessary for the current socio-economical functioning of the city, not only, because they hosted the construction of warehouses and fabrics, but especially, because they accommodated the rural immigrants that would have constituted the human capital of the new economy. For many, these transitional cities have been constituting the access to the urban social network and economy and they retained this function even when the deindustrialization took over the initial motivation of their existence. The lack of access to facilities, poor housing conditions, low property value and population decline transformed these lands into enclaves for the low-income classes and those who are excluded by the society (Grahame Shane, 2005). Conversely, the Neapolitan upper and middle classes steadily fled the historical centre to pursue a new lifestyle on the hills up west and restructured the city to serve their interests. Nowadays Naples has partially lost its porosity and presents many visible and invisible barriers, whether are they segregating infrastructures, low quality urban and housing environment, monofunctional districts, differences in the social status and political representation.
Since the 70s attempt to convert the city’s economy to the tertiary sector, Naples’ development has been driven by the alleged will of answering to the many crises of the city without ultimately being successful (Galasso, 1987). This is, in some measure, due to the fact that the city’s institutions are still partially tied to their conception of the “Holy water” that manifests itself in a in a scarce attitude towards change that results in institutional inertia (De Martino, 2020). Emblematic in these regards are the not fulfilled promises of the at the time just elected new mayor of the city Luigi de Magistris toward the Islamic community in Eastern Naples. This rapidly growing community had been promised in 2011 the construction of the first Mosque of city and an Islamic cemetery. Only after 10 years, at the peak of the Covid-19 pandemic, in August 2020, the municipality granted the concession for the use of a land to bury the dead (il Mattino, 2020).
The genealogy of the Eastern Naples returns the image of a bad land that has never been given the proper tools for development and whose communities have never been involved in the decision making. Nowadays as then, it is a Purgatory, a city of perennial transition, of goods and people: the established Neapolitan population that aspires to move to other parts of the city or the immigrants arriving from overseas.
In this work, I explore how can the study of the porosity of the urban environment set the bases for a community-based design approach. After having delved into the study of the context of the East Coast of Naples, I focus on the Case Nuove and Mercato del Ferro areas, the first districts to be built outside the former walls of the city in the old Borgo Loreto, and their relationship with the Mercato, the historical neighbourhood grown behind the city walls. The two are institutionally one administrative entity and share an increasing lack of porosity that manifests itself in visible and invisible barriers, problematic social issues, and low quality of the urban environment. Taking this case as example, I will define a design process and stakeholders engagement strategy through which to answer the question: Through what means can Eastern Naples provide a spatially just alternative for its citizens?