From ghost town to guest town: the show as urban renewal.

According to UNESCO “the urban historical landscape is the urban area regarded as the result of a historical stratification of values and cultural and natural characteristics that go beyond the notion of historical center or ensemble to include the most broad urban context and its geographical location (setting). It is rooted in a balanced and sustainable relationship between the urban and natural environment, between the needs of present and future generations and the heritage of the past (...). The approach to the historical urban landscape learns from the traditions and perceptions of the local communities respecting the values of the national and international communities”. It is therefore evident that city becomes landscape being the physical place where the natural space merges with the anthropic space in a complex, almost equivocal, stratification of meanings and values, expression of what we call “identity”. Starting from this reading, the contribution proposed here intends to investigate the cultural instance of conservation, enhancement and almost re-appropriation by local communities of small urban historical cores in abandonment, through three apparently very distant cases of study: Bombay Beach in Florida, Humberstone in Chile and Calcata in Italy. Instead, these urban sites, united by the particular relationship with the geographical and natural context, arise in impervious areas with clear physical limits (sea, desert and orography), isolated from the infrastructural network or uninhabited due to environmental disasters. In particular, the attention of the research focuses on the common choice of all three reported examples of a peculiar strategy of action for the revival and regeneration of these singular realities of settlement: that of the show. You wonder, therefore, on the effectiveness that the event, thought as an extra-ordinary experience, can in a certain way restore life to these ghost cities, if not even lead to the permanence of living (experience of the ordinary). Nevertheless, the study leaves a question open: is it correct to speak of “dead city” or rather would it be better to say “dormant”? Cities, in fact, as organisms in continuous metamorphosis, conceal an immense resilience in their ability to transform and adapt their structure and their image.