MARGINALITY AND URBAN TRANSFORMATION PROCESSES. The value of urban scraps to solve urban, social and ecological issues

Abstract

Abandoned spaces and territories surrounding both cities and settlement systems of metropolitan areas, can play an important and central role in regeneration processes from the urban, social and ecological points of view. Starting from the recognition of the value and role that urban margins and “scraps” can assume in an both social and environmental key, it is possible to propose alternative approaches and intervention practices to the more established ones in order to reduce the growing social divide in urban field and counteract the phenomena of spatially based social segregation.

In the case study of Lisbon, it was possible to highlight, through empirical social research, a correlation between morphological margins, infrastructural lines and places of urban and social disease. Their capillary diffusion allows to design a lattice of public spaces that, alongside the existing system of squares and parks, is of considerable support for human and ecological connection and integration.

Keywords: Social segregation, marginality, public space, holistic and multi-scalar approach.