Reinventing Railway Embankments. A New Form of Urban Inhabiting

Often in our cities, the decommissioning of architectural structures connected to the collective mobility infrastructure is particularly problematic, both for their volumetric consistency and for the objective difficulties of the redesign. However, if we applied the innovative practices of adaptive reuse, we could let them play the part of fragments of hypertext ready to be associated and dissociated through individual or collective choices of connection. This paper illustrates a research project focalized on mapping and analyzing the main international case studies about the requalification of urban environments characterized by the presence of disused railway infrastructures to verify how these, despite their architectural conformation, initially constituted an apparent limit to the development of new forms of habitability, instead, have revealed the ability to become significant places for an alternative development of their context. Often the triggering of these virtuous processes of reactivation comes from collective initiatives, a spontaneous expression of new forms of approach to public policies, practices of social innovation, and shared activism. A methodological analysis carried out through a critical reading of some paradigmatic examples of regeneration of railway embankments allows, therefore, to identify different alternative strategies adopted to achieve a positive shift in the perceived metropolitan structure in the areas affected by their presence, the result of which has defined new states of perception of the urban identity of the places involved.