Interaction spaces. Semiotics and urban peripheries

This article is framed in the scope of the semiotics of space, examining the urban periphery and its public space practices (Greimas 1976, Hammad 2003). It is based on a collaboration with an interdisciplinary team of sociologist-architects, anthropologists and urban planners involved in a project for the upgrading of the largest Western-European public housing neighbourhood (about 28.000 inhabitants), located on the outskirts of the city of Rome. The neighbourhood was built between 1983 and 1985, and it is composed of a series of twenty 14-floor towers and about ten other linear buildings of 4-5 floors and of varying in length (up to 1 km). With nearly 28,000 inhabitants, the neighbourhood has a population comparable to that of a small Italian town. Conceived as a “modest” utopian city (i.e. as part of a utopian quantitative program of so- cial housing) meant to introduce order in the Roman periphery (mainly composed by irregular habitation), the neighbourhood quickly deteriorated and it now constitutes one of the areas with the highest crime rate in the city, as well as with most social, economic, and political problems.