From horror vacui to recreatio urbis Free thoughts on “voids”, with particular reference to urban empty spaces; report on a broken off regenerative experimentation

Abstract

“Voids” have no face, no body and no soul, but they contribute towards defining faces, bodies and souls, in a negative or a positive way, in the abstract as in reality, within literature and arts, both in thinking and producing, in housing and living, in appearing and in being.
Starting from this introduction the paper has developed along three directions:
The first one, exploring the concept of “void” in its generic organization into “families” ‒ material and immaterial, physical and psychic, territorial and social, real and virtual families ‒ has focused on the analysis of its positive and negative values, through a free review of theoretical evaluations, sustained by a rational logic, and of behavioural attitudes coming from perceptions which are essentially sensory.
The second direction explores specifically urban empty spaces, ranging in the concreteness of their expression, and “urban planning voids”, analysed against the background of the regulations concerning the evolutive features of the discipline in the last half century.
The third is a story, mostly autobiographic, showing a case study aimed at revitalizing a peri-urban territory concerned by a historical stratification of “voids” in conditions of progressive degradation: Monforte hill at Campobasso. The experience, started about thirty years ago, after having passed a difficult but interesting organizing course, has actually as objectives its early assumptions of revitalization, concluding by a marginal intervention which should have been the starting point and not the finishing line.