New life cycles for the neglected landscapes in southern Italy: Abandoned sports area, Pompei (Campania)

The teaching experience was conducted, between February and June 2021, during the pandemic, in the Landscape Architecture course of the University of Naples. The students were asked to propose a regeneration project (spatial, ecological, social, cultural) for a "Neglected Landscape", near the place where they live. These are landscapes familiar to the students, which they pass through or which they simply observe on a daily basis; in all cases, places that in their imagination stimulate curiosity, surprise, visions, possible regenerative developments. " Neglected Landscape" indicates a hybrid category that includes very heterogeneous conditions: forgotten or abandoned landscapes found in the urban center, in the metropolitan peri-urban territories, or even in the small inland towns of Southern Italy.

The Abandoned sports area in Pompei, is an emblematic case of Neglected Landscape for which a radical project is needed in the strategic approach and in the figurative results, with the aim of triggering a short circuit between a utopian vision and a rooting in reality. The design strategy described here is aimed of a network of public spaces, parks and community garden, reachable in a few minutes on foot or by bicycle from the adjacent houses, available not only during pandemic emergencies, to promote new sociability and new ecologies.