The research aim is to reconnect Rome's Walls and central archaeologica area to the city's vital circuits , as complex infrastructure that can generate new cultural-historical meanings and encourage new functions (tourism, group activities, and urban accessibility) and contemporary outlook (ecological, walkability, ciclability and social inclusion). The concept of complex infrastructure is a transversal reference to the different disciplines involved, within the same intervention strategy.
The Walls and Forums are considered simultaneously as:
1. Historical-archaeological infrastructures - capable of supporting new excavation and documentation campaigns; to be open-air texts for communicating extraordinary urban and environmental evolutions
2. Ecological infrastructures - able to connect and enhance the network of green spaces -precious pools of biodiversity and environmental comfort- and support sustainable mobility
3. Urban infrastructures - multiple, complex spaces that involve different scales of the architectural project, suggesting new public and collective uses.
4. Infrastructures of technological innovation - labs for experimenting new techniques and technologies specialized for cultural heritage;
5. Infrastructures of imaginary - spaces that can communicate the extraordinary stratification of literary, cinematographic, pictorial, photographic and design images and imaginaries.
The research activity begins by developing a model (Phase 1), then validates it through structured comparisons with significant subjects (Phase 2), acquires and analyzes its results and finally achieves its final definition, which will be developed through specific planning simulations in different urban contexts (Phase 3).
Dialogue and interaction will be provided through seminars and design workshops actively involving significant actors (administrators, citizens¿ associations, foundations) towards concrete prospects of social, economic and administrative feasibility.
The main research and innovation elements begin by activating multidisciplinary viewpoints that can interpret in design terms the complexity and multidimensionality of the archaeological areas and the Walls.
Architecture and landscape project:
- A project mode that simultaneously acts on the unitary dimension of the Walls (19 km of which only 13 remain), on specific areas (transversals, significant interferences, high complexity points, double gates) and on the different qualities of the relationship between interior and exterior .
- Reinterpreting the Walls and the Forums as a system of public spaces: new places of reference and social aggregation that can reorder the shape of a substantial part of the city and the neighborhoods of Rome¿s first modern expansion.
- Activating the ecological potential of the Walls and the Forums by regenerating open spaces through standards of naturalness, ease of maintenance and management, high resilience and climate adaptation.
- Considering the Walls and the Forums as a basic public asset that can function as a cultural and economic resource, attracting a sustainable tourism and serving as venues for entrepreneurial initiatives.
- Reinterpreting the heritage of the Walls and of the Forums through projects already in progress in the Municipalities concerned (I and II) and among the Neighborhood Committees, in order to give new meaning to the Strategic "Mura" Planning Sector of the 2008 PRG, by once again making available to the citizenry Rome's extraordinary archaeological heritage, which has been substantially abandoned, rendered largely unusable and scarcely known.
-- Design explorations for the updating of the Integrated Linear Park project (ANCSA - Falini, Terranova et al., 2002) and of the connections between the historic city-central archaeological area in the moenia and the modern-contemporary extra-moenia city. Elaboration of a discrete system of project-places; adoption of multi-scale strategies and sharing spaces
Technological innovation:
- Applying nanotechnologies in the structural monitoring of masonry works, aimed at preventing collapse phenomena (monitoring the stability of the Walls through application of piezoelectric/piezo-resistive deformation sensors, consisting of a polymer loaded with nanostructures capable of converting a small deformation into a signal that, when necessary, can pilot the action of an optical or acoustic signal)
- Low-cost, very low intrusiveness and high sensitivity of these types of sensors as compared to those currently in use (e.g. Bragg fiber sensors, accelerometers, etc.).
Participation and collective imaginaries:
- Potentiating the involvement and participation of Roman citizens living in the areas adjacent to the Walls and the Forums by reconstructing memory, shared imaginaries and development of enhancement activities through multifunction platforms and dedicated apps. The territory is configured as a system of ¿transplaces¿ that combine different flows of narrative/symbolic exchange and physical and virtual experience.
- autogenous imaginaries that arise from the history of assets, events and intangible heritages; mass-media imaginaries (literature, cinema, television series, general information, etc.); tourist imaginaries (which simplify the first two according to specific formats); conversational imaginaries, currently above all on social networks).
- Involvement of the school districts adjacent to the Walls and the Forums as a storytelling production network, by means of advanced technologies, such as social innovation labs.
Communication:
- Planning to convert tourism into flows organized in poles and networks with the participation of local stakeholders. The territory of the Walls can be organized into great poles (for example: Porta del Popolo, Pinciano, Porta Pia, Santa Croce, San Giovannni, San Sebastiano, Ostiense - Portuense, San Pancrazio), each hosting welcoming projects that involve urban redevelopment, transportation, services, and incubators of companies devoted to developing the pole -and the overall Wall network- by means of advanced digital technologies.
- Large-scale application of 3D Virtual Social Museum technologies that make possible a continuous development of web-browsable museums open to the input of citizens, institutions and communities, and exchangeable on social networks.
- Creating virtual and stable museum installations along the Wall route with display installations.