THE LE SALICELLE DISTRICT OF AFRAGOLA IN NAPLES: 40 YEARS OF LONELINESS

Built between 1982 and 1993, Le Salicelle was designed to house people and families who had lost their homes during the 1980 earthquake; years of disinterest in the needs of the neighborhood have transformed it into a new urban ghetto, a drug plaza, a territory of the Camorra, of child wives, of incest and, above all, of abandonment; it officially hosts 7,000 people but, in reality, the overcrowding of housing and the abusive residential use of premises intended for trade or remittance, cause the number of occupants to rise to about 9,000.

The redevelopment plan of the suburbs of Naples had been approved a few months before the earthquake when the emergency of the homeless became a top priority; the plan for the suburbs was therefore implemented with the instruments of the extraordinary law for the reconstruction and development of the territories affected by the earthquake (Law 219/81) to quickly build new housing, thus triggering a real process of mobilization of inhabitants […]