Author: Pasquale Doria
Publisher: Antezza
Category: Architecture and Urban Planning
For those who wish to explore the urban fabric of Matera’s neighbourhoods built between the 1950s and 1960s. Revisiting districts such as Spine Bianche, no special tools are needed to recognise that a method was at work here — one practised by urban planners who stopped narcissistically populating their project blueprints and instead designed spaces to be genuinely inhabited by a dignified community, however long oppressed by centuries of deep-rooted subordination. Public housing in Matera became an expression that was far from meaningless. Public in the truest sense: guaranteeing homes and services to the most vulnerable social classes, assigning civil dwellings to all those who had never had them before. The neighbourhood unit was conceived as a complete and self-contained entity — one that ultimately gave the city its coherence. The serious risks facing these documents and monuments of an unrepeatable era, when Matera became a laboratory city for the entire country, are concerns that have long been voiced and are not difficult to share. The volume also offers a photographic itinerary and an overview of Matera’s urban master plans, by Michele Morelli.