"Rebuilding the Edge" takes as its point of departure the depopulation of small centers in Italy over the last century, a social reality with a direct impact on the built environment and consequences for citizens, local and national. The project focuses on the redevelopment of the Sulmona-Carpinone rail line in the region of Abruzzo and what this means for depopulating centers along it. By studying this event at a variety of scales – national, territorial, and local – "Rebuilding the Edge" explores how architecture can make a contribution to issues usually tackled by non-spatial thinkers, such as politicians, policymakers and economists. In this effort, the project questions architecture’s methodologies of research, its relationship to social responsibilities, and the nature of the design process.

"Rebuilding the Edge" is a mapping exercise. It is a reprogramming strategy for struggling towns along an infrastructural reinvestment project. It is also a design project for a single station along the rail that can maximize a town’s ability to capitalize on incoming economic activity.

This project is only the beginning of a research initiative in partnership with Fondazione Ferrovie dello Stato Italiane, MIT Italy and MIT's Urban Risk Lab. Liminal, a research design and consultancy group that uses a multi-disciplinary approach to tackle the challenges that lie ahead for the Italian countryside in the coming century, is actively working with the community of Pettorano Sul Gizio to participate to governmental funding in order to repurpose the abandoned infrastructure in the town.​ As part of the initiative Liminal will host a three weeks workshop with MIT students along with, Fondazione F.S., MIT Italy and MIT Urban Risk Lab. For two-and-a-half weeks, students will have the opportunity to experience the territory traversed by the rail line, working out of a popup research outpost within the recently renovated station at Roccaraso. The workshop will invite students to think about the future of Italian inner and southern areas, as well as the relationship between regional infrastructure projects and small communities affected by them.

KOOZ What prompted the project?

GDA During my time at MIT, I co-founded a group called Liminal with Nicolas Delgado Alcega and Carmelo Ignaccolo. Liminal is an interdisciplinary team of young professionals working with local communities in small and medium sized municipalities that suffer from economic disinvestment, depopulation, diminishing social services and degrading infrastructure. We started Liminal because we think that technological, social and cultural changes are taking place that make it so we cannot keep banking the future of Italy on a couple of metropolitan centers that receive the majority of human and economic resources.

Italy’s national tissue is actually made up of small and medium sized municipalities with compact urban centers. This is a materially significant reality that comes from a long history of stewarding the Italian territory. Liminal is a means through which we work to develop a future for Italy where the country is made up of a tight knit network of socially, economically and environmentally resilient settlements in close proximity to one another. We think our collective future depends on the participation of marginal areas that have often been overlooked. A model where there is a healthy distribution of economic opportunity and resources across the country is the only way we can avoid falling further down the path of radicalization and polarization that we are seeing today.

The project is one of the early initiatives I undertook within this framework. I had realized how challenging it is to address some of the most structural issues that affect small communities if we operate exclusively at the scale of one town. This project was an attempt to think about a network of towns brought together by a common piece of underutilized infrastructure: the Sulmona–Carpinone rail line. I was curious to see if we could come up with ways in which the rail line aggregates individual communities into a critical mass of people and resources that could turn around the territories.

This proposition led me to become acquainted with dozens of communities along the rail line, discover ongoing railway revival projects, and understand the nation-wide pandemic recovery policies that have their eyes on small communities. The outcome was a project that looked at the problems from a variety of scales to understand where the most impactful opportunities lay: from a train station, to a town, to a network of towns along the railway. It taught me incredible lessons about how large and small initiatives reinforce one another, and are equally important if we want to make big changes to the workings of our built environment.

KOOZ What questions does the project raise and which does its address?

GDA It was really challenging to bring clarity to the many questions that kept coming up as I investigated why we are going through such a drastic demographic crisis, and how we can address the spatial consequences deriving from this negative trend.

Some of the main questions the project asked at the beginning were: what are the policies that incentivized the emigration from small towns in favor of growing cities? What are the public-private initiatives today that can change the projected future of small and medium sized municipalities? The more I looked into these two questions, the more I found myself in a web of issues that were interconnected with one another. These spanned from the impact of national policies to the lack of economic opportunities, issues of agro-mafia, the immigration crisis, and the role that transportation infrastructure has had for inner and southern areas of Italy.

These questions are too vast and complex to address in one go. It is a lifetime project that requires cross collaboration and the involvement of multiple communities. It is a national, but also European emergency that requires the support and talent of planners, economists, entrepreneurs, non-profits, politicians and more. Nevertheless, the project proposes an architectural and infrastructural solution for one town along the railway called Pettorano sul Gizio, arguing for the importance of access to these towns, which are often difficult to reach and poorly connected to the road and railway network.

KOOZ How does the project approach the issue of the depopulation of small centers?

GDA As I have mentioned before, the issue of depopulation is extensive and reaches all aspects of our society. Because of the broadness of the topic, the project investigates how to look at the depopulation of inner and southern areas of Italy and what is the architect’s role in addressing it.

“Rebuilding the Edge” allowed me to explore the interrelations between three distinct components of architecture: its methodologies of research, its social responsibility, and its design process. The project applies GIS mapping and photogrammetric tools to register the rural realities along an abandoned rail line in Central Italy. It interprets available data at the territorial scale and generates original data more granularly through contemporary technologies. Combined with stakeholder interviews and policy framework analyses, I have found that this sets the stage for architecture to find its place within this social phenomenon.

“Rebuilding the Edge” in fact proposes that architecture has a relevant role in the articulation and resolution of larger initiatives that seek to address the challenges faced by towns across Italy. It does not attempt for architecture to act as a 'savior,' but rather concludes that architecture must operate in the company of other fields with unique forms of expertise. Ultimately the project employs this research methodology and disciplinary reflections to test the impact that they may have on the design process. The outcome is a proposal for a building and piece of infrastructure that connects with initiatives in course at the regional scale.

KOOZ How and to what extent do you believe the current pandemic might have affected this trend?

GDA I think that we are in the midst of drastic demographic and socio-economic change that the pandemic has only accelerated. In relation to the revitalization of secondary urban and rural centers, the pandemic had two principal consequences. The first is that it led many people in competitive cities with inflated costs of living to think about the challenging balance between quality of life and economic opportunity. The second is that it accelerates an already growing trend towards remote work that has the potential to radically change the way economic opportunity for professionals is distributed across territories. It is hard to predict where we are headed, but these cultural and practical changes have catalyzed all sorts of experiments that small cities and towns in Europe are increasingly equipped to host.

The resources that have been negotiated through the European Union’s Resilience and Recovery Fund to address the economic crisis brought on by COVID19 also have the potential to help smaller municipalities be a healthy part of the future of Europe. Many of the regions characterized by these kinds of settlements will play an important role in the transition towards a green economy that is packaged within the recovery plan. The investments in key infrastructure and incentives to private enterprises will hopefully lay the groundwork to reinvigorate the economies that many of these settlements fundamentally depend on.

We are already seeing, however, how challenging it is to put these resources to work at their fullest potential. At Liminal, we have been working on visioning and grant writing projects with small municipalities in Italy. This has made us highly aware of the challenges in terms of bureaucracy and human resources that are in the way of an ambitious plan like the European Recovery Fund. The more I learn, the more I believe in “hands on” research as a tool through which to better understand how to tackle these situations.

KOOZ What are the opportunities offered by the repopulation of these sites?

GDA I believe that the repopulation of these sites will benefit the country at large. By repopulation I don’t mean inverting the demographic trend entirely and trying to bring back the same amount of people that were there a century ago. This is very unlikely for several reasons, chief of which are the radically reduced labor requirements of rural activity today. Also, most of these towns had population densities that are way above our modern standards of space and privacy, meaning their current carrying capacity is actually lower than a century ago.

That said, what these places have to offer is directly tied to some of the main challenges we are facing today: the green transition, energy autonomy, sustainable agriculture, food sovereignty, and so on. In a conversation with the mayor of Castel del Giudice, a town in Molise, he made me see that these places enjoy another advantage. As spectators rather than participants in the economic system of the last century, these places and their populations have suffered. However, they have also avoided much of the malaise of modern society. Particularly if we look at environmental resources, we find that they are still integral. Agricultural soils are less tired, forests have been regaining vitality, and the watersheds of rivers and lakes are thus less contaminated.

This reality also translates to culture. Quality of life and community values which we are in dire need of in large urban centers right now are more strongly ingrained in some of these places, perhaps out of sheer necessity. This combination of factors gives me a lot of hope about including the Italians living in these areas in the future of our country without engaging in an extractive relationship that creates short term value while impoverishing the land in the long run.

We often speak about addressing climate change by densifying populations in large cities so that we can have more open surface for wildlife and the plant world. We certainly need to reduce the amount of land we occupy for dwelling and develop urban models that reduce transportation emissions. But the work we have done at Liminal has also shown me that places that we do not steward–places we abandon rather than rethink our relationship towards–often do not become the green paradise we imagine. The disappearance of civic culture through which people have an interest in the well-being of the landscape that surround them because they are directly affected by it is a grave issue. What replaces this model is informality and alternative governance systems that thrive in lawless environments. Italy has a unique opportunity because its cities and towns are by tradition extremely compact and urban in the best of senses. We have to find new models to make them into a prosperous network, where next generation density is not synonymous with a couple of large metropolises distant and detached from the direct impact of environmental challenges ahead of our country’s entire land surface.

KOOZ How do you imagine the project developing through time?

GDA At Liminal, we’ve launched Liminal Lab, a decentralized research laboratory across the Italian peninsula. Our pilot initiative is in many ways a continuation of this project. We are collaborating with MIT Italy, MIT UrbanRisk Lab and Fondazione FS Italiane on a three-week workshop that will bring 18 students from MIT to live and work in Abruzzo this June. The students will live in Pettorano sul Gizio and work out of a popup lab in the Roccaraso train station, which has been recently restored by Fondazione FS Italiane.

The students will focus on the towns and territories that surround the Sulmona–Carpinone rail line, with a particular focus on its northernmost half. We will be looking at the realities along the rail across six scales, each of which will allow us to delve deeper into a critical social or economic reality in the area. The topics we will explore go all the way from the intersection of sustainable agriculture and ecotourism to the role of migrants in reviving local economies. Each group of students will meet local stakeholders, document an existing condition, analyze it and make a design proposal.

Liminal is also looking for volunteers and collaborators to promote and concretize the multiple initiatives we aspire to achieve. We are interested in expanding our network and make this a much larger movement in the architectural field than it is today.

KOOZ What is for you the power of the architectural imaginary?

GDA Working on this project has convinced me even more that architecture’s power lies in how it gives people the possibility to imagine a different way of living; one that breaks away from the problems of the status quo; from what we feel society has imposed on us. The tools of architecture can take us a long way because they have the power to inspire us to believe that the world can be different when everything around us tells us it cannot; when everyone tries to take away the last bit of hope left in us to keep pushing forward. Producing images of the future through architectural projects is the way we stay optimistic, the way we make the visions concrete so we can rally enthusiasm and support for them. In the end, designing architecture is a hopeful exercise, which is why I believe that, even if small, we can always make change through it.

Bio

Ginevra D'Agostino is co-Founder and President of Liminal, a multi-disciplinary network of international professionals committed to addressing the challenges that lie ahead for communities in the Italian countryside. She is a principal of Alliata / Alcega, and is currently at MIT pursuing a Master in Architecture. At MIT, she founded Out of Frame, a platform envisioned to retain dialogue across the university’s diverse community as it was dispersed globally by COVID-19. Her current academic research, supported by the Marjorie Pierce/Dean William Emerson Fellowship MIT’s NuVu Prize and MIT’s Transmedia and Storytelling Initiative grant, focuses on abandonment patterns of towns and infrastructure across rural Italy. Ginevra received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Architecture from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She has taught at MIT as part of its Summer Research Pedagogical Experiments program.