Public cities: an urban question,
beyond a certain modernity

An opportunity to go back on: LaboratorioCittàPubblica, Città pubbliche. Linee guida per la riqualificazione urbana, general coordinator Paola Di Biagi, editorial coordinator Elena Marchigiani, Bruno Mondadori, Milano, 2009

The book Città pubbliche. Linee guida per la riqualificazione urbana (Public cities. Guidelines for urban renewal) is the output of a research program involving, for many years, a large number of scholars and universities, with different points of view but sharing the same aim to produce an unitary text. A collective text, addressing the construction of innovative policies and projects on such a topical issue as the regeneration of council housing districts.
Districts that are interpreted as target places of spatial and social renewal processes, extending to wider parts of the contemporary city. Some months ago, the presentation of the book to young researchers, who are starting new studies, gave an interesting opportunity to re-read its contents in critical terms, to draw attention to aspects that have been left in the background, to focus on questions that need to be furthermore discussed today that the Twentieth Century seems to be really finished (Bianchetti, 2011).
From a certain time distance, the book of Guidelines shows its capacity not just to close a research path, but to open new reflections. Reflections that firstly deal with the important role that the renewal of public cities can and has to play in tackling the re-emerging of housing (and social housing) problem. This is a strategic issue in view of the redefinition of an urban question characterized by a deep crisis of social, environmental and economic assets and of the ways they have been faced and governed during the past century (Secchi, 2010).
On the background two more fields of reflection, partially developed by the form and contents of the Guidelines, can be recognized: the need to re-think the role of public action; the urgency to re-define the notion of space and project.

Elena Marchigiani
Assistant professor in Urban Design, Department of Civil Engineering and Architecture, University of Trieste, email: emarchigiani@units.it