Dall’eterotopia all’ipertopia. Ripensare lo spazio dei cimiteri urbani nella città contemporanea

Abstract

The book ‘From Heterotopia to Hypertopia. Rethinking the Space of Urban Cemeteries in the Contemporary City' addresses the relationship between heterotopic cities of the dead and the contemporary city. The morphological relationships and socio-cultural conditions that have led to the construction of urban cemeteries outside the city since the 19th century have changed profoundly, and this urgently calls for new questions and different postures. In accordance with the progressive changes in social structures and radical technical innovations, a profound transformation of rituals can be observed that puts inherited heritages and future planning at risk. Therefore, the design and rethinking of these parts of the city, their enhancement and re-signification, become imminent necessities for the regeneration of entire parts of the city. The book proposes hypertopia as a possible alternative to heterotopia, not understanding it as a replacement but rather as a possible objective to be pursued in the context of a typological shift that can be progressively experimented with by means of the project in order to update the norms and thus enrich the theoretical framework itself. In this sense, hypertopia is assumed as a political, temporal and - above all - spatial strategy. Several international case studies were investigated in the research to which this volume refers. In addition to the projects described through images and drawings in the chapter ‘The journey as a research tool: an atlas of images for parts of cities and architectures’, five case studies are explored in depth to substantiate the hypothesis that reuse, recycling and re-semantitisation are design strategies that should complement the more established constituent features and processes of growth and articulation of contemporary cemeteries. The three projects described in the final part of the book provide possible forms of the concept of hypertopia by proposing three strategies for the cemetery system of the Poggioreale hill in Naples.