Abandoned army barracks in Friuli Venezia Giulia (Italy) as a potential for new time-shaped community landscapes

Abstract

The dismantling of the Italian Army Barracks in the Norther-East of Italy in the last 20 years has left a series of wide abandoned areas. In these places, nature has freely operated as a designer, creating new transitional landscapes in the places devoted to protect the Italian borders during the Cold War. We could talk about ‘auto-regenerative’ landscapes. This paper aims to illustrate briefly the process-making of this kind of unconventional landscape over the second half of the XX century in the Region Friuli Venezia Giulia through different scales of intervention that have activated multiple spatial relations over the time. This exceptional infrastructure-based landscape, sized-up by the Italian Army necessities, after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 has been reconfigured and gradually abandoned, becoming almost completely unused from the year 2000. Authors propose a reading of these derelict spaces and formulate possible new scenarios of sustainable regeneration and inclusive reintegration that aspire to promote a kind of open project to return them, as a social pay-back after more than 100 years of militarization, to the Friuli Venezia Giulia communities.