Letter to local government administrators

On public spaces

Urban redevelopment and regeneration

Dear local government administrators,

as you well know, the built city represents the ‘material’ historical memory of a community, the record of the passage of time, and caring for it entails a great responsibility.

The city and its territory constitute a community’s habitat and, at the same time, preserve and represent its collective memory, history and identity, its consolidated cultural heritage and its expectations for future development.

Public space is the setting of our collective image and everyday life. If the urban environment is rethought without a project for high-quality public spaces, the impoverishment of its social sphere will advance, leading to the fragmentation of the social body. Working on public space through landscape design initiates a process in which time plays a determining role, developing a spatial structure capable of encouraging everyday practices that are fundamental to individual and collective well-being.

The preservation and redevelopment of urban spaces represent one of the paths that must be pursued correctly in order to ensure positive outcomes. Preservation and redevelopment are implemented through programmes and projects (intervention plans) that, when grounded in knowledge and interconnected with one another, make it possible both to protect what already exists and to plan transformations aimed at the gradual improvement of urban quality.

Every citizen has the right to experience, within their own city, high-quality environments in which they can feel at home. For years, urban planning has debated public space at a ‘human scale’, urban decorum, urban quality and related issues. These spaces, whether newly created or already existing, must possess qualities of excellence and harmony with their surroundings, and must be part of an overall vision for the urban area.

My work defines the objectives of a genuine intervention plan, articulated at the urban-planning, mobility and landscape levels, while also envisaging the detailed redesign of important sections of public space and the creation of a new scenario and renewed urban quality.

The assessment of intervention areas integrates into the analysis not only functional aspects, but also the historical and landscape characteristics of the surrounding context. It identifies places and elements of quality around which a process of urban redevelopment can be developed.

I believe that redevelopment projects for small settlements must express both the homogeneous character that distinguishes them and the articulation of their public spaces into distinct parts. They must regard the existing historic fabric as a source of regeneration, investigate the relationship between the historicised context and contemporary design, and focus on the potential of the open spaces within the urban fabric to generate new and unexpected opportunities for regeneration.

Reading the urban layout as an element capable of giving form to both public and private space, rethinking it in relation to the focal points represented by monuments and examining how these can redefine the system of routes and urban voids, structures a design process oriented towards sustainability and regeneration.

The study and development of these projects are not intended to address exclusively practical and functional aspects, but also and above all, the psychological implications of architecture. The practical and functional dimension is therefore considered as part of a broader system in which the environment influences people and in which the purpose of architecture transcends functionalism.

Good design is essential to creating public spaces that are pleasant and useful. Yet the city and its spaces are not made solely of stones and inanimate materials: above all, they are places shaped by the relationships established between people and between people and spaces—places of identity, relationships and history. I therefore firmly reject the purely functional notion of public space as a banal area of land assigned a specialised use, whether green or grey, for traffic, parking, pedestrians and so on.

In recent years, many cities have countered the degradation of public spaces by restricting vehicular traffic in urban centres and developing soft mobility, cycle paths and pedestrian routes. Where this has not happened, everyday life has become more difficult, especially for children and older people. Today, in all urban centres, large and small, citizens are calling for a greater quantity and quality of public spaces in order to make cities more liveable.

Among the various critical issues identified across the territory, the most serious and evident is almost always the road-traffic system. Vehicular traffic entering and crossing urban centres is the main cause of the gradual loss of identity and the progressive deterioration of public space and consequently of the urban scene along its route.

Over the years, the configuration of the affected public space, sidewalks, planted areas and adjoining spaces, has adapted itself to the automobile, relegating spaces and routes intended for people to empty areas devoid of quality.

There are also often significant tensions caused by the intersection of cycle and pedestrian routes with high-speed traffic.

These must be addressed through a reorganisation of the road-mobility system. In many cases, the solution involves rationalising, rather than eliminating, motor-vehicle traffic, while recognising the fundamental importance of creating predominantly pedestrian areas.

Consequently, in a redevelopment project, one of the key issues is undoubtedly the citizens’ reclamation and repossession of the street and, more generally, of the open spaces connected to it as a high-quality public space on a human scale.

Significant urban redevelopment therefore encompasses the enhancement of landscape features, the rationalisation of public spaces and routes, the creation of new pedestrian and cycle paths, green spaces, new sidewalks and the widening of existing ones, together with the revision of traffic systems and critical intersections.

Finally, in working at the urban scale, I have observed how the design theme acquires further content relating to places of faith. These historic places of faith now play an important cultural role and bear witness to a living faith within local communities.

It is therefore important to design an active and meaningful pathway, also with the hope of establishing strategic synergies between the various ecclesiastical and civil stakeholders, through a concrete project for their enhancement and redevelopment. This is where the Church presents itself not merely through the extraordinary richness of an immovable heritage to be preserved and revisited, but also as an institution capable of ensuring that cultural heritage remains a vital, living body.

The revitalisation of memory is perhaps the aspect of greatest and most immediate importance for places of faith. By revisiting churches, chapels and sacred sites associated with the historic faith of a community, people can reclaim a memory belonging to their own genealogy, identify with the values preserved within those places, and invest them with vitality and spiritual energy, reinserting them into the relationship between religious experience and everyday life.

Such an intervention plan aims not only to promote the redevelopment of the public-space system as a whole, but also to trigger a concrete process of urban regeneration.

The initial public investment required to implement an intervention plan can certainly generate significant economic effects at the local level. These can be effectively expressed through a process of urban regeneration, in which private investment becomes fundamental, together with the necessary conditions to generate and encourage it.

An intervention plan can be implemented through a coordinated set of works divided into spatial and temporal phases. It is essential, however, that these works be grounded in a general project that frames them within a unified overall design.

If you have read me up to this point, it means that the themes briefly addressed here have stimulated your interest, since, as citizens and administrators, you undoubtedly care deeply about the well-being of your territory and your community.

I believe that a good local administrator, driven by a sincere and passionate commitment to the public good, is aware that the future of their territory lies, at least in part, in the design choices concerning transformation and redevelopment that they are called upon to promote.

July 2025

<