Informal infrastructures and public spaces along the migrants’ routes

The migrants’ routes across the Italian peninsula - from the Mediterranean coast through the northern Italian cities, and all the way up to the alpine borders - test the strength of European common space. Not only the administrative one, that have formed the European Union, but also the physical one, that actually is revealed in urban and rural public spaces chosen as nodes of complex and risky routes. Since huge flows of people escaping their home countries have crossed the community area, ports, stations, border check-points, undergo a temporary occupation which demonstrates how the simultaneous needs to manage humanitarian emergencies and to be comply with security requirements change the shape, real and perceived, of public spaces. However, an itinerary is more characterised by the structure of the physical relations between its nodes, rather than the quality of each one. Poorly documented due to their clandestine nature, the migrants’ routes have added a new layer of infrastructures over, under or side by side to the codified one. The informal use of these routes, as well as their implicit intermodality, is similar to what occurs along the neglected areas of the metropolitan regions either to what has been experimented during the occupation of symbolic urban spaces for political, economic or social reasons. There are phenomena - like the modification of public spaces or the arising of informal infrastructures - that cyclically force the architectural and urban design to renew its methods, tools, techniques and strategies inherent the configuration of the inhabited space. To seize this opportunity, in the European context, it is necessary to adopt a new approach able to consider the vulnerability of urban space and the risk analysis connected to any form of civil coexistence as key elements for the design of spaces of hospitality.