Abstract

The paper deals with waste and leftovers of the disfunctional metabolism of the contemporary city, traditionally neglected by aerial and standardized topography, to address their 'coming back' to the attention of planners and urban designers. The author proposes a different interpretive perspective to understand the multidimensional landscape of contemporary urbanity focusing on the 'reverse city', i.e. open space networks as entangling mosaics of rural, water, infrastructural and drosscapes. Such a reverse city can address new environmental and social regeneration cycles, as provided by examples of new design strategies now under investigations in Campania city region, within a national research program of which the author is the scientific coordinator for the Naples unit.