Traces, Juxtapositions and Rewritings: Critical Reconstruction as Strategy of Reinventing Cities

Reconstruction after traumatic events is an increasingly important issue in architecture, due to the unprecedented scale with which the destruction of the built environment occurs; the consequence for the discipline is the need to reflect on the identity of the city, its meaning and possible strategies for its maintenance. Rather than starting from an a-contextual datum, the case of the city of Mosul will be the pretext to identify methodological criteria for a strategic recovery plan. Particular attention will be paid to the relationship between the monuments and the city, identifying in this connection a key issue to investigate the generative dynamics of a place and therefore the sense of the city. The relationship with the physical/natural datum and the historical/cultural one will be considered as an essential element of comparison to give to the monument the strength to be able to affect the city transformation process.