Towards Regenerative Wasted Landscapes: Index of Attractiveness to Evaluate the Wasted Landscapes of Road Infrastructure
Authors: Somma Maria 
Published: February 2022

In recent years, the modernisation process has led to a radical transformation of the territory, producing waste in various forms (José Zapata Campos and Michael Hall in Organising waste in the city, Bristol University Press, 2013). Waste, not only in the sense of domestic or industrial waste but also in a broader concept linked to the territory and landscape’s spatial context. The concept relates to the degraded and subsequently abandoned area. Places understood as waste, areas expelled from the city and extraneous as they have no use and are now at the end of their life cycle.

These areas, recognised as wastescapes (Amenta and Attademo in CRIOS 12:79–88, 2016) or a waste of land (Berger in Drosscape: Wasting land in urban America, Princeton Architectural Press, 2007), draw the and landscape’s mosaic increasingly fragmented. Also, current mobility requirements lead to a discussion on the design of road infrastructure. While in some cases the tendency is to upgrade existing ones, in others the choice is to design and build new routes. These new routes are causing many problems for the landscape, which is becoming even more devastated. A territory made up of linear elements, and ecosystem networks that physically connect urban space to environmental space create multiple landscapes within which transport networks act as a glue between the different urban poles and as a generator of abandoned areas (Russo in Techne 15:39–44, 2018).

With this in mind, the study aims to analyse and assess, through spatial indicators, the potential that abandoned sites close to major road infrastructures can offer to society not only in economic but also in environmental terms.

Starting from the Focus Area’s municipalities identified in the Horizon 2020 REPAiR project (Geldermans et al., in REPAiR project: REsource Management in Peri-urban AReas: Going beyond urban metabolism, 2017) for the Neapolitan context, only four of the eleven municipalities identified by the project are considered to make the analyses exhaustive and replicable in other contexts.

The methodology defined the relationships between the built environment and abandoned infrastructure spaces, which cross and fragment the city and are devoid of functionality.

The study had structured in three main phases:

Identification of the abandoned interstitial areas of the road and neighbouring infrastructures in the municipalities of Afragola, Cardito, Casalnuovo di Napoli and Casoria (municipal territories of the metropolitan city of Naples);

Analysis of the indexes of proximity to the urbanised areas and connectivity between the abandoned interstitial areas and the urbanised fabric;

Evaluate these indices for the suburban areas to identify the attractiveness for future urban regeneration processes.

In this sense, the attractiveness potential of abandoned interstitial spaces of road infrastructures had assessed.

If included in a decision support system, these analyses and evaluations would support the definition of urban regeneration actions. In this sense, it evaluated the potential for the attractiveness of abandoned interstitial areas of road infrastructure. In this context, particular attention is paid to the environment in which we live and its protection and preservation.