The Rifo Research: Mappings for Urban Regeneration and Soil Restitution

The essay presents the results of the Rifo research on urban regeneration, conducted in the last years at the CST-DiathesisLab of the University of Bergamo in Italy. This research demonstrate that many urban territories possess building stock to regenerate, such as brownfields and obsolete public housing. Indeed, at the beginning of the Third Millennium the global economic crisis caused an industrial or state-owned building surplus and a lack of public residential buildings conservation, generating low-quality constructions that are now too expensive to maintain. In this context, the Rifo research has formalised a method, based on the territorial analysis and the use of online mappings, for supporting a circular regeneration of urban contexts, connecting brownfields to obsolete public housing. Through a radical intervention, it proposes to replace old or unused buildings that have no architectural value or do not respond to contemporary urban needs, in order to decrease covered surfaces and to acquire open spaces. The latter can become green areas for recreational, cultural or sporting functions, giving back a part of consumed soil to local communities. The example refers to Lombardy, the most populated and productive region in Italy, where the Rifo research has quantified and qualified brownfields as well as obsolete public housing, experimenting two digital mappings for the capitalization of research results that can become a platform for local communities’ participation in urban regeneration.