VALLE AURELIA IN PROGRESS

The workshop-week has been dedicated to work with OSA architettura e paesaggio, LUS [Living Urban Scape] and ORIZZONTALE acting with one intervention interesting the Valle Aurelia area, focusing on the Borghetto which is settled along the via di Valle Aurelia path, immediatly before the Pineto Regional Park. All the area is historically called Valle dell’Inferno and it’s strongly marked by the presence of some clay layers that determined – between the late nineteenth and early twentieth century – the settlement of 8 kilns for bricks production, necessary to the city’s building growth. The Borghetto was born around the Torlonia Kiln, one of the industrial structures settled in the area, to house workers and their families. Between the early twentieth century and the eighties, the building plot of the working-class suburb grew up more and more, often in urban decay, but always maintaining its social identity related to kilnmen community. From 1976 the left-wing town council launched the roman-slum clearance plan, indroducing Valle Aurelia too. In the mean time, some plans for affordable and social housing were produced and built and, in the early seventies, the indipendent institute for housing (IACP) began to build the “towers”(Piano di Zona Valle Aurelia) along the viale di Valle Aurelia, ended in 1981. In the summer of the same year, it was decided the demolition of the Borghetto suburb to remedy its bad hygienic conditions, transfering the inhabitants to the new PdZ. The empty spaces can be a resource to start a general regeneration of the neighborhood: our project transforms urban voids, resulting from demolition, into opportunity for a urban renewal. We intend to transform empty spaces into socializing and sharing, playing, meeting, exchange ones through the design and implementation of temporary and/or reversible interventions. The aim is to reveal the potential of underused spaces or residual and make them an active part in the system of socio-spatial relations inside the district. The intervention is self-built and articulated at 3 main points: 1) lettering (stencil on the street-path) along via di Valle Aurelia, from the PdZ to the Borghetto; 2) path’s signals and proposals for transformig some specific spaces along via di valle aurelia (stencil on wooden formworks); 3) realizing an equiped public spaces in the Giardino del Maresciallo and preparation of the photographic exhibition “un paradiso che si chiamava inferno” – which sounds like “from hell to heaven” – (40 pictures given by Roma Amor photographers).