T'era Park | The madness of cemeteries
Basic information
Project Title
Full project title
Category
Project Description
T'era Park is a design proposal for Naples that is aimed at reinventing cemeteries. How to extend the dense city of the dead ones laying on the edge of the historical city? Instead of further land consumption, recycling derelict sites can be an alternative. In European cities, psychiatric hospitals are often close to burial grounds: in Naples the proximity between the abandoned asylum L.Bianchi and the Poggioreale cemetery is a chance to trigger a new sense of belonging toward both heterotopias.
Geographical Scope
Project Region
Urban or rural issues
Physical or other transformations
EU Programme or fund
Which funds
Description of the project
Summary
Naples is in need of wider burial grounds. The city strategic plan focusing on the "Memorial Park of the Poggioreale hill" foresees further land consumption by extending the historical cemeteries system. In the north-east of Naples, the Poggioreale hill hosts many cemeteries that were built over time by juxtaposing different enclosure walls. A strong perception of exclusion and otherness characterises the urban experience that undermine the collective sense of belonging.
More in general, the relationship between cemeteries and society keep changing faster and faster because of gentrification - while urban fabric is expanding, the relationship between urban and rural is changing at its roots - globalisation - new forms of nomadism are causing the interruption of the past identity weak links between living ones and dead ones, between cities and cemeteries - and innovation - techniques for burial are changing moving toward more ecological approaches.
As a result of these processes, the huge material and immaterial heritage represented by these other cities is getting compromised because it appears as an obsolete waste standing outside the lively dynamics of the city: the consistency of the heterotopia caused its total exclusion.
At the same time, following the Basaglia Law in 1978, Italian psychiatric hospitals were dismissed and then, a similar marginalisation process as cemeteries, even more direct because of the sudden loss of function, concerned them.
In European cities periurban areas, mostly in Italy, cemeteries and asylums are often close urban fragments of the XX century. This proximity was the premise for the design proposal T'era Park in Naples. The project gives an alternative to the current strategic plan through a new possible narrative: the former psychiatric asylum Leonardo Bianchi can be recycled starting from it's green spaces proposing a new typology of cemetery defined by overlapping the layers of the city of dead ones and the one of living ones.
Key objectives for sustainability
Cemeteries need to be reinvented in their role within urban, social and cultural contexts. In order to do that, understanding differences between burial ground typologies, that mostly depends on the country - because of heritage, culture and society - and also on the adopted techniques, is fundamental.
Generally, one of the main features of this heterotopia is the abundance of green spaces. Open spaces are meaningful to cemeteries design even though in some contexts there are landscape cemeteries or park cemeteries while in such contexts as the Italian one the most affirmed typology is the architectural cemetery. It means that green spaces are not valued that much and then they are much less than, for instance, in German wooden cemeteries.
According to both the role of nature in cemetery design and management and the role of cemeteries in dense urban contexts, different strategies have been runned in countries such as Belgium or France to affirm the ecological value of these infrastructures. Labels such as Zéro Phyto, Cimetière Nature - providing useful tips in design and management - are assumed as good practices in determining design or redevelopment strategies more environmentally sustainable and based on circularity.
Beyond the choice of an architectural design enabling nature to grow as suggested by the aforementioned labels, the proposal T'era Park includes some experimental burial techniques (see Capsula Mundi, Boschi vivi, DeathLab) based on sustainability principles and merging together different urgencies as reforestation, wooden management or recycling drosscapes.
Thus, in Naples, the former psychiatric hospital can be interpreted as a fragment of a wider green system linking the Hills Park and the wood of Capodimonte, to the west, with Poggioreale cemeteries, to the east.
Beyond all this, recycling urban fragments is the most sustainable and circular design strategy one can adopt: the abandoned asylum can become a green lively urban infrastructure.
Key objectives for aesthetics and quality
If the term aesthetics is related to what is perceived through the senses, then this proposal is dealing deeply with this topic. The main problem detectable in the XX century heterotopias is how people perceive them. The feeling of otherness and exclusion determined, theoretically, by the positivist approach witnessed by the Foucaultian definition and, practically, by the spatial device of the enclosure walls, are the main limit for these heterotopias in contemporary cities. Thus, design for cemeterial spaces must deal with aesthetics - meant as perception, not appearance - reinventing the quality of the experience that one can have in there.
T'era Park is doing so on two levels. Firstly, it is renegotiating the image of the psychiatric asylum. The design proposal is not erasing the heritage but is trying to open the space in order to make this memory understandable and overwritable. The only way to overcome the asylums' stigma is to go in and recognise their new values. Secondly, T'era Park is a device to propose a new imaginary for burial grounds. Cemeteries should not be anymore the sad place where to go only for visiting the beloved ones but it is proposed as a place of care. Care is here meant in a wider meaning: a place where to share, meet, relax, and think. A cemeterial landscape can be capable of offering all these services for human well-being.
Because of its typological structure made of a system of two-story buildings linked by covered pathways, the charming abandoned asylum "Leonardo Bianchi" allows multiple spatial interpretation. On the one hand, the huge amount of serial buildings suggests a design working by differences, multiplying functions and uses. On the other, the relationship between the vaulted galeries and the buildings allow a reinterpretation of the citadel by layers: the city ot the living ones can be superposed by interconnected layers to the city of the dead ones and not anymore just juxtaposed and separated by an enclosure walls.
Key objectives for inclusion
Cemeteries should be rethought because of deep social changings characterising the current time. The complex multiculturality and critical economic conditions impose the need of reinventing these places in their spatial structures, their meaning and their values.
The cemetery space, being actually the only city public space concerning everyone, needs to ensure equal opportunities. When different religions blend together in the same space, the latter has to interpret each cultural background, making manifest every specificity shaping new spatial patterns.
Thus, architectural, landscape and urban design should investigate these aspects of reality in order to detect possible transformations. This can happen only if considering an interdisciplinary approach going through scientific and humanistic research fields, and, at the same time, involving the communities the project is conceived for.
T'era Park proposes an inclusive vision of burial grounds on three main levels.
Firstly, the inclusion of many burial techniques is aimed at giving appropriate answers to the multiple requests often related to different religions.
Secondly, the search for monumentality that characterises the historical cemeteries is opposed to an approach that aims at re-evaluating the "common good".
Thirdly, the inclusion of different functions - respectful of the place's sacredness - enables it to reinvent rituals and to trigger sharing and mutual-aid practices.
Definitely, the heterotopia's borders are redefined, The provision of a design strategy intended as a process opens up to possible future scenarios not determined since the beginning. In this way the rehabilitation of the former psychiatric asylum can follow the feedback coming from inhabitants about the experimental proposal.
Multiple scientific communities, many stakeholders, communities referring to different cultures are all involved in a wide process of inclusion, above all the inclusion of the cemetery in the city.
Physical or other transformations
Innovative character
Considering that the neapolitan condition assumed as a case study is frequently detectable in many european cities, the strategy of recycling dismissed, derelict and underused heterotopias (or, more in general, obsolete urban fragments) in order to extend burial grounds without more land consumption can be assumed as exemplary in relation to different contexts.
This strategy holds together environmental sustainability and circularity, aesthetics and inclusion by working on urban drosses that can acquire new meanings.
T'era Park is recycling the former psychiatric hospital Bianchi by manipulating both natural and built palimpsest and proposing new relationships between the main elements of the urban layout. Reinventing and giving new meaning to these heritage is the only opportunity to insert them in the contemporary city dynamics.
First of all, the design proposal recognises a great value to the vegetation that has grown during the time of abandonment in which the former asylum have been closed and uninhabited. The ecological capital inherited can not be erased in a rehabilitation project of the site. So, the landscape has been the first material for the project proposing new geographies hosting the burial function.
At the same time, these sustainable design strategies working on both landscape and buildings contribute in creating a new aesthetics of the place where nature is assumed as an urban component capable of giving peace. Variety and differences will be the main features for this new aesthetic where death is not considered anymore something not belonging to life cycle but something one should co-exist with. In this direction, T'era Park became a place of inclusivity where to nourish the spirit having care for oneself, for others and for the place in a common construction of a new narrative.