Il ruolo della periferia nella costruzione della città moderna

The essay critically traces some exempla of public residential housing that have characterised the development of the urban periphery of 20th century Italian cities. There are many experiences that describe the close union that existed throughout the last century between the suburbs and the construction of new public housing in our country. In this regard, three different historical thresholds that mark as many significant moments in the urban history of Italian cities are identified. The different periods correspond with the promulgation of likewise laws. The first one in chronological order was the Luzzati Law, which tried to respond to the industrial city needs for new housing through the birth of the Istituto Autonomo Case Popolari (IACP). The Luzzati Law was part of a broader and necessary policy of social reconstruction in our country. The second one was the Fanfani Law in 1949, which reformulated the dogmatic canons of modern rationalism in terms of recovering the values of memory such as, for example, the concept of 'unity of the street' in the reconstruction after the Second World War of the so-called neorealist city. A rethinking not only of architecture, but also cultural, for a recovery of traditional values of living in the 'Poetics of the neighborhood', as defined by Manfredo Tafuri, in which the 'unity of the neighborhood' and the 'space of proximity' strongly conditioned the design of the street and of the open urban space. Finally, the last one, the Law 167 for the development of the Piani di Edilizia Economica e Popolare (PEEP) of 1962, which had started the season of the “large dimension” that had the ambition of being able to control the different scales of the project simultaneously, in architecture, in the city and in the territory, by defining the so-called utopian city of the 1960s and 1970s. Each of the three different laws defined a precise idea of the concept of public housing in terms of settlement principles, housing standards and residential typologies, and nowadays it allows us to focus on the different changes in the housing policies implemented by the Italian State in the last century. This reinterpretation is useful, even today, to recover strategic logics of design intervention, not only in architecture, but also in public housing policies and practices that aim at the theme of urban regeneration that the suburbs in our cities need.