Responsive architecture and adaptive reuse of the 8th ex-CE.RI.MANT military area in Rome

The 8th ex-Ce.ri.mant is a today dismissed 33-hectare wide military area in Via Prenestina 931, in the Rome eastern suburbs but still within the GRA, provided with 84,000 extended sheds designed by the engineering school of Pier Luigi Nervi. Around its borders, a very heterogeneous and problematic periphery - both for infrastructural and social issues - has developed along the consular roads and the railway. This paper presents a project for an adaptive reuse project of the area as a Temporary Pole for Contemporary Creativity (Polo provvisorio per la Creatività Contemporanea or PpCC). While the stratified program derives from the analysis of the social fabric and the supply-and-demand of cultural and social services in the Municipality V, its development is framed in the context of a Smart City involving the areas along the railway line and inspired by the Circular Bio-economy or the “4R” production model – Reduce, Recycle, Reuse and Recover – which shapes planning, production and consumption at different scales. In particular, this is accomplished through “weak” interventions by means of existing movable structures and materials which are recycled or sustainable in environmental and economic terms. The urban space is conceived in an environmental, temporary and responsive key, an approach grounded on the formation of a sustainable ecosystem integrated with the neighborhood and open to formal and functional variations during use through physical and digital sensors. At the same time, activities are chosen in order to guarantee both the recycling of "physical" waste, such as food, clothing, objects, furniture, etc., and inclusion of “social” waste and “weak” subjects, such as the elderly, children, immigrants, and evicted.