Re-cycling the industrial heritage: the experimental agenda of Bologna

In the shrinking city (Oswald, 2005) a new nostalgia is born: that for the archeology of the industrial artifact, yesterday domineering and inaccessible, today naïve and primitive, inserted in an urban landscape of which it could have a decisive role. The blossom of different spontaneous and cultural actions aimed at urban recycle seems to be today the presupposition of an advancement in design culture, giving multiple answers to the crisis of the large systems (Ciorra, 2011) and opening up a new frontier of discourse on the city. One of the factors that brakes this action is constituted by the rigidity of the Plan, which contributes to slow down the propulsive and cultural drive of those hypotheses which become unsuitable for the narrow prescriptions of city regulations (Piperata, 2017). The complexity of this issue is addressed by analyzing the case study of Ravone, an abandoned freight yard in Bologna, where the experimental nature of the reactivation proposal and the pioneering character of the regional law have favored the birth of a decisive practice of temporary use.