Neglected Narratives of Post-war Italian cities. Actors and rationalities in the shaping of the ordinary residential landscape

The essay intends to question some established interpretations of the growth of post-WWII Italian cities as a homogeneous process and a uniform project. They often overlooked a significant part of the composite and fragmented urban environment made of a plurality of objects and cultural positions, focusing instead on the history of the City Plan, the ‘public city’ and a set of groundbreaking architectural solutions. The article investigates the ordinary residential environment built in Italy between the 1950s and 1970s – often stigmatized as a low-quality, unplanned side effect of the processes of land and building speculation – as the result of the layering of processes, policies, spatial forms, disciplinary tools and actors rarely investigated in their interrelations, originating multiple and stratified narratives. The essay addresses this quantitatively relevant residential landscape as the site of encounter and negotiation between a multitude of actors, with their diverse and sometimes divergent interests, strategies and rationalities, contributing to dismantling shared images of postwar Italian cities and the dominant narratives on the trajectories of their urbanization.