The future beyond Matera 2019

The city of Matera is among the few heritage-cities of the UNESCO W.H.L., and it is also the first city of Southern Italy elected European Capital of Culture 2019. This ancient city, just for these events, in the last 20 years, but with an exponential increase in the last 5, has undergone a considerable urban and economic transformation. The city of Matera has a millennial history with alternating phases and it’s phase of the last century is characterized by a shame for the poor conditions of living, instead today it’s characterized by a prospect of pride and opportunity. However, for Matera city, it seems already necessary to open another phase after 2019: to reconsider all its places in this growth process, aiming at an integration between Sassi, villages and neighborhoods, innovating its offer of public services and infrastructures. It would be appropriate to indicate other directions that support a new urban regeneration models useful then to rediscover extraordinary places of local identity: just to give some neglected examples, there are the traditional excavated architecture and the Duni’s Theater by E.Stella; and then, the archaeological sites and the public spaces of La Martella (L.Quaroni) and Spine Bianche (C.Aymonino). They would be sustainable operations, for a new urban and environmental culture, how they try to demonstrate some Degree Theses developed in the local School of Architecture. It is a project, in fact, still possible within the “Matera 2019 Bid Book” (dossier), but expanding its “open future” themes (ancient future, continuity and disruptions, utopias and dystopias, roots and routes, reflections and connections) and including some forgotten places. If the Matera 2019 event was concentrated between historical buildings, small squares (vicinati) and churches, beyond the City of Sassi there are places of other important “memories”, ancient and modern, but out the buffer zone where at the same period it’s born a kind of informal city: modern infrastructures that overlap Roman roads (ex. Appian way) or up sheep-tracks (ex. transhumance route Melfi-Castellaneta), warehouses that overhanging extraordinary rupestrian architectures (ex. the rupestrian church of Santa Maria della Valle), etc. The post-Capital period is certainly an opportunity to discover all the original culture of Matera, also the culture that today we neglect. It is an opportunity to ask ourselves about the “context”, about the relationship inhabitant/city/environment.