Factories of Knowledge to Build a New Civitas

Abstract

The transformation and reuse of abandoned public real estate – whether isolated buildings, wider complexes, or large urban districts – has become an increasingly important topic in contemporary architectural debate over the past forty years. It reflects a new approach to reality, one that considers the careful use of ever more limited resources available and, moreover, recognises the value of memories from a recent productive past of ordinary life, of toil and labour. At the same time, it offers an extraordinary opportunity to rethink the city, conceived not just as urbs, as a built form, but above all as civitas, as a community of people with their relationships, their aspirations, their political, religious, or spiritual ideals, or simply their humanity. In this regard, such a huge building heritage, scattered across the cities which experienced industrialisation – in Italy, in Europe, and worldwide – nestled in their urban fabrics, often represents untapped potential. In Aristotelian terms, it is a potentiality, a potential reality, a formless, inanimate matter awaiting a rewriting, a reinterpretation, a re-signification. Through such a transformation, it can be turned into an actuality, into a form having life and meaning, rejoining the ongoing flow of the world and once again being part of the endless and inevitable changing of space and time. Based on these reflections, the result of a long-term theoretical and design research, this essay critically analyses a selection of case studies in order to reconsider the disciplinary boundaries of adaptive reuse in contemporary architecture. On the one hand, it highlights the social potential of reuse aimed at the production and transmission of knowledge; on the other hand, it identifies a poetics of the ordinary as a possible interpretation of the theme that, by rejecting the culture of waste, can open up for unexpected future perspectives.