The importance of public housing peripheries in the process of city regeneration: the Napoli’s case study

The paper explores the peripheries of the city of Napoli starting from a different definition and description of its huge public housing stock. The main research hypothesis is that public housing transformations, their historical evolution and differences, are very important elements for the city regeneration politics design, that should be able to deal with the complexity and variety of the present problems (first of all social exclusion). The limited effectiveness of peripheries politics is often tied to an erroneously homogenous reading of the peripheries as if they were an homogeneous thing. For this reason the paper proposes a description of the Napoli’s peripheries based on their public housing dimension, that it is important to redefine the different characteristics, invariants and problems of this parts of the city. Through this process of re-descriptions of the different peripheries, with theirs ‘evils’ (or values), we recognize background’s emergencies and problems that supply indications for the treatment of important problematic dimensions as policy design proposals for the peripheries public politics.