VIRTUAL ISTANBUL HERITAGE(S)

Abstract

While political agenda confirms the role of heritage as shared resource and pillar for a sustainable society and environment (EC, 2018), urban regeneration case studies involving it live under typological constraints. The superimposition of protection as autarchic limit, other than allowing as only possible output the objectual valorisation of heritage, in those less recognizable cases reflects also a social and cultural detachment. It’s the Argan’s definition of an interrupted city where the «tides of different ages have come and gone, leaving on the shore the wreckage of distant shipwrecks. Like all wrecks, they sit within a space that feels both immediate and boundless. It is a city that has lived on remains: first stripped fragments, then ruins, today waste» (Argan, 1978). Against this framework the paper presents the urban regeneration of one of the most important Rome’s 20th century heritage example. The Former Slaughterhouse transformation in the “City of Arts” sits as an example of a successful negotiation involving its whole processuality and looking forward to an interpretation able to negotiate with its legacy towards a new, open and adaptive, social and cultural identity. This condition also remarks the role of heritage belonging to modernity as specific condition allowing weaker constraints but, together, weaker perceived value and legacy to be engaged socially. The case study represents, with the primary role of Roma Tre University as main driver, a today successful and still evolving example as the adaptive reuse, in both its processuality and output, allows history to be again a dynamic process, while “Tradition” to be perceived as participation in this evolving scenery (Rogers, 1958).