Ricerc@Sapienza

Transformations underway in cities and their peripheries call for an in-depth examination of urban regeneration, suburban regeneration and integrated requalification in order to build a project model for development and change. While suburbs provide examples of environmental degradation, social disadvantage, poor housing, poverty, marginality and abandonment, they can also evolve into urban communities and become strategic resources for local regeneration. In the complex urban context of many metropolitan cities, a survey of the processes and tools used for requalifying these areas, of the actors involved in these processes, and of the objectives for urban regeneration is needed, as is an analysis of the outcomes of such processes where they have already taken place. These issues, in fact, have been little debated at a national and European level.
The main aim of the project is to examine whether regeneration of peripheral metropolitan areas is possible, and how to achieve it. That is, to analyse how the tangible and intangible cultural heritage of these areas, which are so often neglected and abandoned, could be conceived as a common good: a shared resource to be managed and reevaluated through cooperation between public and private actors and organized civil society. The study will focus on the suburbs of Rome: peripheral areas that are extremely disadvantaged and which are characterized by poverty, marginality and social exclusion. The research will adopt an integrated methodological approach, bringing together standard and non-standard techniques both in the exploratory and in the analytical stages. In particular, visual sociology will be used as a method for analyzing the socio-territorial dimension.