Naples is the greatest city of southern Italy, with just over a million inhabitants and an extremely high population density. Once the capital of its own kingdom, Naples has been the torch bearer of Mediterranean culture since the time of the Greeks and was the epitome of advanced civilization throughout the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries.

There is no visible border between the city and its province. The entire conurbation is one vast homogeneous, over-crowded agglomerate from the Gulf to the slopes of Vesuvius. Despite the absolute ban on building on seismic ground, the area around the volcano is heavily populated.

Subway

Naples is a city of hills. The main hills, Vomero, Arenella and Posillipo, were the first areas of speculative building, denounced in the celebrated movie 'Le Mani sulla Città', winner of the Golden Lion at the Venice Cinema Festival of 1963. The public transport system is very poor, even including the subway system of which just the first phase of building the inner-city ring took twenty years. It is not clear when, if ever, it will be completed. Only a hundred thousand citizens use the subway on weekdays and the city’s taxi lanes are more clogged by car drivers than anywhere else in all of Italy. The new subway is intended to serve twenty-seven stations over twenty-five kilometres and to link the central urban areas with the suburbs and residential districts, the central station, the port and the airport.

Housing

Naples has a chronic shortage of housing; lovers still have no choice but to have sex in cars parked in the streets. The value of a square metre of land is greater even than Milan, the richest Italian city. An interest in improving public space, city gardens and parks has become apparent only since 1995. Existing public space often lacks furniture or facilities for the disabled. Public gardens dating from the seventeenth century as well as modern parks remain valued by citizens, even though all are fenced and locked at night.

Illegal

The city fought for a new identity when the unification of Italy in 1861 pauperized the South by relocating industries and financial centres to the North. Naples seems stuck. Dense and vertical, the city took its present form during the period of massive illegal building speculation in the sixties and seventies, and again in the wave of suburban house building after the major earthquake in 1980. Naples is resistant to progress, with an antagonistic attitude towards modernity.

Fenced in

Members of local government nurture their own private interests and further weaken the citizens’ shaky faith in democracy.
Naples’ public space offers a perfect example of the familiar local dichotomy: small private sky vs. collective horizon. The beautiful public parks and gardens so plentiful in the old and new town are isolated or fenced in for safety, leaving the population to compete lawlessly for what is left of public space.

Rare public space

Competing for public space: this is mine! The density of people and their cars is the main issue. Despite a tradition of strolling through the city, which dates back to the Greek Mediterranean culture, and the enormous potential of undervalued areas, public space in Naples seems a residual and fragmented part of the city texture. Streets, corners and squares became gathering places. The often lawless urban space commonly mixes cars and pedestrians, jamming the narrow streets and severely straining the general mobility and liveability of the entire city. As a result any public space is rare and scattered and citizens have to fight for a glimpse of the horizon. Neapolitans express their highly-developed individualism mainly to satisfy their own needs at the expense of everybody else. Space in Naples is always something to be conquered.

Street as meetingpoint

Over-population and a lack of inner courtyards in all Neapolitan housing blocks combine to modify the functions of the city’s streets and squares. The street is used as a meeting point beside the little ground floor houses despite the heavy and congested traffic. The square is treated as private property: a place to play football even though it is forbidden, to ride a motorbike even though the square is pedestrianized, to sell counterfeit goods, to set off illegal fireworks at night. Many Neapolitans still believe that he who arrives first keeps the best for himself.

Open-air museum

The old Greek-Roman city centre has been under UNESCO protection since 1995. Despite the risk of losing its heritage qualification through the worst kind of conservative policies proposed by the Naples city council, that same body has attempted to preserve the district by declaring it totally car-free. The Old City, in daytime, is the world’s largest pedestrian open-air museum, covering some seven hundred hectares, with two hundred churches plus innumerable Greek and Roman palimpsests from Partenope and Neapolis. The progressive denial of car access reclaimed two large squares for the city. San Domenico has been pedestrianized since 1991 and Plebiscito since 1994. San Domenico was for ten years the meeting point for thousands of young people, reclaiming the old city from degradation, danger and drug dealing. Plebiscito is still little used by the public due to its daunting expanse and the absence of night-time security. Recent criminal activities there at night have kept people away. Illegal activities recently took over in the Greek-Roman area, so now no one goes there at night.

Public art

Plebiscito Square is more recent than San Domenico. It was started in 1817 under French rule and finished in 1846. It is often used for big events and concerts and can hold more than 180,000 people. After its pedestrianization in 1994 the city council tried to encourage citizens to feel this new public domain to be their own by holding New Year’s Eve celebrations there. At the same time the council made the space available for annual public art projects led by a famous Italian critic, Achille Bonito Oliva. Anish Kapoor, Joseph Kosuth, Richard Serra and Michelangelo Pistoletto were some of the artists whose works were shown either on the square or in the public museum devoted to contemporary art.

Urinoir

Since the initial enthusiastic response to the celebrations, the citizens seem to have turned away from this space and instead used the inside of some of the public artworks as a convenient place to have sex, or a piss. 'Naples' by Richard Serra is one example, a gigantic steel spiral that hides the space inside from anyone on the square. The curator never spent any time educating the citizenry in the appreciation of contemporary art, nor did he attempt to explain the significance of these public exhibits. He, like his successor Edoardo Cicelyn, seemed to prefer communicating only with a few representatives of the global art world, ignoring the fact that his precious public art works are standing in the middle of a public square.

Disorientation

Nowadays, due to safety risks, Plebiscito square is unfrequented.
Despite the perceivable danger, particularly from gangs of youths hanging about to pester pedestrians, there are still a few visitors left over from when the space was a huge car park. Since the 80s young break-dancers meet to dance near the portico of the church. And some Neapolitans bring tourists to play a silly game: walk towards the church with your eyes shut. You will always go astray, because the sheer immensity of the space causes disorientation.

Suburbs

The same council strategies of revitalizing public space with celebrations and events that failed so dismally in the Piazza del Plebiscito have been applied, with similarly poor results, in the suburbs. In the district of Scampia, north of Naples, Europe’s largest open-air drug market, the city council built a huge arena in 2006 and called it Big Events Square. It is built of concrete without any trees or benches. The park beside it, built in 1994, is always empty because it is surrounded by broad streets and the underground approach tunnels to the entrances are closed for security reasons. Only one park entrance is still open. The square was never used by the population and in 2007 the city council was forced to hold a concert to entice the people into the new space.

Public space as afterthought

Public spaces in the suburbs are built far beyond human scale. Somehow these objects are imploding clusters, invisible in the city texture. Their failure is evident in the disorientation of the residents of those suburbs. Scampia is a good example of what Naples lacks: any contact between the rulers with the power to make laws and those who are expected to follow the rules. The lawmakers are not elected on the program they present, but on the favours they promise to citizens. The rulers and the ruled are two separate entities with no social body in common. This deficit is visible in the quality of city design, especially in the failure of public space policy. No serious negotiation ever occurs nor is there ever any follow-up on people’s needs. These are the common practices of the city council architects and urban designers. They build without any public consultation and they create public spaces only as an afterthought. Benedetto Croce, one of Italy’s most important thinkers, who died in Naples in 1952, wrote that the first political prerequisite for a healthy society is cohesion.

Industrial district

Betting on the future: to recover the terrain of the Kuwait oil refinery. The sparsely inhabited east of Naples, its first industrial district, is the spacious and social future of the city. The ground once given over to oil installations will be replaced by modern sustainable industry, services and an entertainment area, including a gigantic green park. The refineries will be relocated over the next twenty years. More than six square kilometres of brown-field ground will be recovered for public use. Many projects have been proposed in line with the Urban Development Plan, but they are unlikely to come to fruition in the foreseeable future due to powerful deep-seated opposition and to the misuse of the terrain by criminal forces. The ground pollution is the worst in Italy. Even though the East of the city is the site of the richest high-tech industries, such as aerospace, it remains a residential grey area with no sidewalks or squares, severely blighted by high fences and pipelines above and filthy streets below.

Garbage-disposal

The recently re-elected Berlusconi government held its first cabinet meeting in Naples as a signal to the city. According to recently proposed laws the government is looking for a way of escape from the chronic garbage-disposal emergency by placing a new incinerator and temporary dump in and around the refineries area. If this new law goes through, over the protests of landowners and the citizens, the touted park area will never be built.

Pedestrian tunnel

The post-industrial East of the city is fragmented by railways, highways and pipelines and its refineries district is the largest area of toxic industry located in the middle of a city anywhere in Europe. Housing districts are divided and any social interaction is imaginary, due to inefficient public transport and the consequent massive car use. To create a public and common domain and to join two residential districts, Naples city council has built a pedestrian tunnel beneath the central city railway. Although the construction of this tunnel has been completed it has yet to be opened because officials cannot agree on security arrangements. When it is opened for use it will probably break the isolation of more than fifty thousand citizens, although only if they walk. Unfortunately, the entrance to one end of the tunnel is in the middle of Rione Ascarelli, one of the most derelict areas of the city.

New districts

Despite the prevailing character of the city, an historical patrimony with few prospects for moving into modernity, the form of urban Naples is gradually being changed by the addition of new districts to the old city. Will these new areas ever be able to decongest the heavily occupied areas?

Modernist dream

The dispersion of administrative and business districts from the centre started in the sixties. Twenty-five years later the modernist dream descended on Naples in a form designed by the Japanese architect Kenzo Tange. Begun in 1987 and still only half finished by 1995, it was supposed to revitalize the former industrial area in the east of the city. Laid out across a huge concrete platform the business district is a massive car-free pedestrian space, a UFO that has unaccountably dropped in to become part of the city texture, all mirror-windowed high-rise buildings and express elevators, fenced gardens and commercial arcades. In the hours of daylight it is crowded with office workers but by night and at weekends it is desolate, watched over by private security guards. Nobody likes to walk in the pretty squares or have an ice-cream after dinner. All the bars are closed.

Under-exploited public space

This district is a good example of under-exploited public space, so often conceived as detached islands far removed from any perception of the city as a unity. Once the new subway is opened, in 2012, with a station and a public square designed by EMBT of Barcelona, this painful isolation may be alleviated. The district has no public transport links to the city and is built on marshy ground, which has forced the engineers to adopt a pile foundation method to increase the total built-up area. Visitors to the district see only the garage level and have no view of the upper spaces unless they go up there on purpose.

Bagnoli North Wharf

The Poggioreale and the Gianturco districts in East Naples have housed the main industrial area of the city since the seventeenth century. Other manufacturing took place elsewhere, for example porcelain in Capodimonte. Ponticelli and Secondigliano were known for intensive agriculture till they were annexed to Naples in 1926, after which both areas went into steep social and economic decline.
In 1904 the Italian government put a steelworks on Bagnoli bay. Framing the otherwise enchanting western part of Gulf of Naples and standing for a century between the isle of Nisida and Pozzuoli town, Bagnoli housed steel, concrete and chemical plants until they fell into disuse in 1991, since when planners and politicians have argued about the conversion of a two hundred hectare degraded brown-field site as the new western lung offering public space for culture, sports and entertainment. A new science museum and a business innovation centre have been placed where a chemical plant once stood.

Symbol of hope

Nevertheless, despite the setting up of a special public company devoted to urban transformation, Bagnoli Futura S.p.A., the city council remains unable to decontaminate the ground and to start even one of the several conversion projects, for example the 35-hectare Sport Park. The Urban Development Plan of the area was finally approved in 2003. In 2005 the former steelworks’ North wharf, standing out into the Gulf perpendicular to the shattered Bagnoli, was converted into a public pedestrian promenade that is open until sunset. No public furniture, no bars: the wharf’s only amenities are the sexy king-size love-benches and decking-level lighting. This amazing temporary space of freedom stands as a symbol of hope, representing the freeing of crowded cities from the disaster of massive industrialization.
The Promenade Wharf stands nearly a kilometre out into the fresh sea breeze. Instead of demolishing it, which would have been very expensive, when garbage dumping was placing so much strain on their budget, the city council architects decided to renovate the wharf at a minimum cost.

Council-owned public space

Italy is the land of council-owned public space: the idea of comune is Italian and is particularly highly developed in such central Italian regions as Tuscany and Emilia Romagna. The word 'commune' derives from the diminutive form of the word for township which first appeared in the Middle Ages, characterizing a public space in the middle of the city, where commercial and leisure activities occurred alongside discussions and public encounters, in the tradition of Greek civilisation. These cities were and are more democratic than others, especially those in the South, where foreign domination marked social and public space as a symbolic entity that would add to the grandeur of the king or the pope.

Danilo Capasso & Diana Marrone
Naples 26/05/2008