The Street as a Common Space: Three Projects by Orizzontale Architects' Collective

Among the most relevant European instances in the relationship between memory and regeneration, a key role is certainly played by the street, in terms of use, urban vitality, and meaning that its space represents for the inhabitants, especially if we consider the hopeful prospect of a future overcoming of the car monopoly as a privileged means of transport. In the history of the European city, the street has traditionally been a centralizing place of city life. With the development of carriages first, and especially of cars from the twentieth century, it quickly became an element of separation and fracture within the urban organism. This condition is still very deep-rooted, even if in the last decades there are more and more projects that aim at recovering the multifunctional character and the polysemic nature of the street, as it has been since the origins of urban civilization. In the three projects presented here, the street is considered the main place of urban life, a space of re-appropriation of the public dimension of the city by inhabitants. The interventions described use the street as an extension of common living, as a playground, as an "outdoor living room". For the Rome-based architects' collective Orizzontale, design action is based not so much on installations or architecture in itself as on the relationship between urban contexts, inhabitants and latent spaces that their architecture reactivates or "prefigures".