If the morphology and the studies on the urban form are closely related to the social aspects and are responsibility of architects and policy makers, the issue becomes even more complicated if we're talking about cities with a high number of buildings under public ownership or urban fragments with important dimensions. In Italy there is a very rare case of recent foundation that is the neighborhood Monteruscello in the city of Pozzuoli. Built in the 80s to face the bradisism events that had made uninhabitable other city areas, Monteruscello today, for its dimension, can be considered a "city in the city" where the 90% of the buildings are under public ownership. The neighborhood's project is designed by Agostino Renna who had built Monteruscello through analogical composition with fragments of spatial references of other places and cities. The architect has put in the neighborhood - mainly made up of rural areas - its urban model adapting it to the specific geography of places. During the years the neighborhood has never built an own identity becoming one of the most degraded areas of the city. The paper deals with the issue of urban form and morphology today starting from the study of Monteruscello - as imagined by its creator through the critical issues that underlie its design - and through an experimental design of a new agro-urban landscape for the neighborhood that involves three hectares of public green spaces - now abandoned - turning them into agricultural lands to urban use and growth resource.

References

Renna, A. (ed.) (1980) L’illusione e i cristalli : immagini di architettura per una terra di provincia (Clear, Roma)

Giglia, A. (1997) Crisi e ricostruzione di uno spazio urbano : dopo il bradisismo a Pozzuoli : una ricerca antropologica su Monteruscello (Guerini, Milano)

Capozzi, R. (ed.) (2016) Agostino Renna : la forma della città (Clean, Napoli)

Pagano, L. (ed) (2012) Agostino Renna : rimontaggio di un pensiero sulla conoscenza dell’architettura : antologia di scritti e progetti 1964-1988 (Clean, Napoli)