Work on the informal city. Restoring the environmental balance of cities from their outskirts

By describing an experimentation carried out on a ‘informal’ settlement in the far north east outskirts of the Municipality of Rome, the paper aims to demonstrate in which way outskirts can become an extraordinary opportunity to activate processes of smart urban regeneration. The paper describes a project developed on the area of Tragliatella in Rome, with the aim of developing a codified design methodology for the recovery of unauthorised residential settlements in the outskirts of the city, lacking primary urbanization works and essential services, and requiring redevelopment processes in order to ensure their liveability. The project proposes a smart model linked not only to the energy performance of the buildings, rather to all the other environmental parameters of the urban settlement (i.e. soil permeability, heat island effect, micro-climatic comfort in outdoor spaces, etc.). The experimental design approach, outlined in this paper, could be effectively transposed to other fragmentary suburban settlements, characterized by the low quality level of the houses, whose origin is not necessarily spontaneous.