Healthy City

The urban organism included between the Park of Capodimonte and the Park of the Hills in Naples has been re-read in relation to the modern concept of a city similar to a sick body that needs care, explaining a clear relationship between the care of the city and the care of the health of its inhabitants.

The planning strategy, underlying the program of interventions, focuses attention on the redevelopment of two districts of Naples: Materdei and Sanità, symbols of a deviated sociality and environmental degradation at the national level. From the mapping of the network of public services, residual spaces and abandoned hospital structures, descends the design hypothesis of a green infrastructure that allows the connection between the urban center and the hilly area, and between this and the wider metropolitan context, intercepting monumental areas, fostering functional integration and responding to the need of enhance the accessibility to the green areas. On the edge of the historical city, the area of San Gennaro dei Poveri, deactivated hospital, which is rehabilitated and refurbished as a rehabilitative territorial structure and museum of the Catacombs of San Gennaro, welcomes the park's outcrops and reconfigured through a project of infrastructure for sport and health, is a fundamental part of this new system of urban relations. The decision to design an innovative space, dictated by the desire to create a place of integration between different activities, such as sport, rehabilitation and pre-existing school and health services, in an urban setting and complex healthcare restructuring, is an essential way to promote health and care of the citizen. It is a strategy that, applied in a widespread manner, may involve the reduction of health care costs and the increase in services related to sport, well-being and rehabilitation throughout the metropolitan area. At the same time, the project of a green infrastructure and an area equipped as an integral part of a health facility, now being decommissioned, will be able to be refurbished and qualified as a central element of a Citadel of widespread health.