Il progetto per il waterfront di Palermo dal nuovo Piano regolatore portuale ai progetti di rigenerazione delle aree urbane

Gateway cities will be most dynamic cities of the future and Port/gate cities will increasingly become cities with the ambition, the capacity and the resources to be connected to the network of hub-cities woven around the planet. Port areas are local places within global networks, gateways crossed by planetary fluxes of energy and waterfronts are network of places, functions, additions and hinges between the coast and the city, between the port and urban activities. A waterfront is not just a port area, but a concentration of functions that can be productive, relational, cultural, recreational, residential. It is not a closed and protective area, but an osmotic interface, it is a permeable perimeter, sometimes rigid, but sometimes equally “spongy”. Waterfronts are strategic areas capable of generating a new urban form and producing a new landscape by transforming the streams of energy (material and immaterial) running through the great infrastructural networks to make them more vital, communicative and competitive. The paper will explore Palermo’s Waterfront regeneration project that is part of a wider innovative program entitled “Ports&Stations” financed by the Ministry of the Infrastructure with the active partnership of the City Government, the Port Authority and the Italian railway company. Their guiding vision presents a new city for exchange and innovation, in which the port functions, the new hubs of the Mediterranean armature, are integrated with great urban services, residences and local area services whose objective is to provide a more obvious “cityeffect” on the seafront. The tool chosen to implement the integrated strategy for the increase in infrastructures, development of the city and competitive growth is the new “Piano regolatore portuale” (PRP), whose objective is to create a permanent system that incorporates the commercial port (ro-ro and container), the passenger and cruise port and docks for recreational boating, not simply by improving locations and functions, but by connecting them with the environmental requalificaton, the services, parking areas and many new urban functions. Palermo’s Waterfront regeneration project propose strategies, design, services and businesses spaces and, in addition to the issues of general port functions, the project also cope with the question of “city-port interaction areas” and “interface areas”, which are highly attractive for new residential, commercial, cultural and recreational functions. The experience of Palermo’s Waterfront regeneration project deal with the question of multisectoriality and raises some issuses around the necessity to include multidisciplinary action in which a variety of subjects participate to produce a dynamically synergetic environment and to solve the conflictual relation between subjects, tools and competences.