Marginalità e rigenerazione: riflessioni sull’area di Villa Maltese

This paper presents the findings of the workshop “Reinventing Marginal Areas: heritage, cultures, technology” (CoRi Unipa 2023), held in Palermo as part of the activities of the PhD programme in Architecture, Arts and Planning, run by the Department of Architecture. The research took the area of the historic Villa Maltese in San Lorenzo hamlet, a property confiscated from the Mafia, in the Piana dei Colli district, north of Palermo, as an emblematic case study to investigate marginality and the tensions between historical memory and urban fragmentation in the contemporary suburbs. Through a multidisciplinary approach, the work combined an analysis of the site and its stratifications with design strategies, developed in collaboration with stakeholders and international academics, with the aim of reinterpreting marginality as a condition upon which to build in order to generate new centres of significance.