Between Rome, Naples and Trieste. Corviale and Other Megastructures: New Places of Cultural Exchange and Insubordination in the Contemporary City

Since the second half of the twentieth century, Italy’s urban organism, no longer “reducible to the treasure chest of the historic centre, continually opposed to the periphery as absence” (Terranova 1993, 351), has expanded through building episodes juxtaposed and opposed to the historic city, largely represented by public residential complexes inspired by the megastructural movement. Even today they are still true anticities, or rather cities within cities, with their own urban and architectural specificities and, over the years, they have undergone functional and spatial transformations, as well as social and cultural contaminations, through which an attempt has been made to adapt the rigid spaces of these complexes to the needs of the inhabitants, in many cases, designed to exclude subjectivity and individual choices for an abstract social and figurative utopia. Thanks to these interventions of socio-cultural contamination and architectural transformation, the controversial spaces of Italian public residential complexes may become the new venues of cultural exchange and insubordination in the contemporary city.