UNIVERSITY IS CITY. THE INFRASTRUCTURE OF EDUCATION AND RESEARCH AS AN ENGINE OF URBAN REGENERATION

The aim of the work is to reaffirm the strategic correspondence between the university settlements and the city, in a logic of absolute complementarity. The University has always been the institution dedicated to education in its highest and most noble form: likewise, the relationship between universities and the urban context has characterized the debate on the management and development policies of the city. The first universities arose far from the cities according to a concept that saw advanced training and research as distinct from the progress and life of the urban context. The isolation of the university settlement from the vital center of a constantly growing city, while on the one hand guaranteed, with its physical autonomy, a more marked dedication to study and research, on the other decentralized the flows of students and staff university, in an attempt to limit integration with the urban context. Today the city and the university have profoundly changed: the progressive physical development of the anthropized contexts has gradually reached and definitively incorporated the most ancient university buildings originally built outside the urban boundaries. The city, in the new current phase of economic development, increasingly needs the University as the driving force for innovation and the revival of the economic-entrepreneurial fabric through culture.