Comunità e quartiere come laboratori applicativi di rigenerazione urbana e territoriale

Several plans based on the concept of "community", clearly defined by Erwin Anton Gutkind in his essay The expanding environment (1953) as "an entity whose location and extension ensure maximum possibility of realization of the social program", were largely applied and urban and territorial sciences developed a plenty of examples of community based strategies throughout all the Twentieth Century. The first part of the work explores precisely what were the first models of cities or regions organized by the principles of cohesion of the community and what were the transpositions at the architectural and urban scale of this philosophy. Since the first attempts proposed by utopian planners of the Nineteenth Century up to Clarence Perry’s Neighborhood Unit conceived in 1929 for the Regional Plan of New York. This concept of the city and territory generated huge expectations being especially suitable for the functionalism instances proposed, for example, by the Athens Charter. Same principles animated the post-war reconstruction and expansion plans all over Europe with different issues. Italy implemented the “community” principles in the INA-Casa programme as well in the rural reform programmes, with some advanced experiments as those conducted under the patronage of Adriano Olivetti in different parts of the country and especially in Sardinia. Today all this theoretical and built heritage are posed as starting point of strategies potentially successful for solving the most of urban and territorial criticisms and are suitable to implement sustainability practices developing new instruments and appreciable policies for metropolitan regions, setting a new approach of shared responsibility on planning process, on resources availability and use, on social issues leading to the definition of a paradigm for supporting resilience policies in urban and regional planning.