THE ROLE OF GREEN SPACES FOR THE SUSTAINABLE RECOVERY OF CULTURAL HERITAGE. A proposal for intervention in the former Neapolitan psychiatric complex

With the Basaglia law, which abolished asylums in 1978, a long administrative process was started in Italy to decommission the old psychiatric hospitals in favour of a network of new facilities suited to their health and care function. It was a process that lasted over twenty years, as a result of which not all former psychiatric hospitals were recovered: data show that in 2018 only 50% of the psychiatric hospitals had been given a new lease of life after their closure. In Naples, the engineer Giuseppe Tango designed the large ‘Leonardo Bianchi’ psychiatric hospital in 1890, immersed in the nature of the Capodichino hill and isolated by shrub barriers and with large outdoor spaces.
The contribution outlines the relationship of this building complex with greenery, between monumentality and historical culture, proposing new forms of social interaction and new spatial and material interconnections. The authors, starting from a qualitative design and aiming at a zeroing of building waste, thanks to the forecast of their reuse on site during the design phase, propose the recovery and refunctionalisation of this large urban complex. The presence of the natural park where the psychiatric pavilions were designed a century ago meets the need in a metropolitan city, that of Naples, which in today’s historical phase has an increasing need for public green spaces.