Jost Ulshöfer
The preservation and renewal of Bologna’s historic city represents a central point of reference in the history of seventies urban planning in Italy and abroad.589 In 1970, the architect and town planner Pier Luigi Cervellati, member of Bologna’s municipal administration at the time, coined the slogan of an »old city for a new society«.590 In 1983, the historian and communist politician Pier Paolo D’Attorre stated, that in Bologna the aim had been to save »the men and the stones«.591
So what seems to profile Bologna as a special case is a particular coupling of preservation and social aims. It includes not only the reuse of historic buildings for public and cultural functions, but also the attempt to assure residents a right to permanently live in their neighborhood regardless of their social class.592 Given economic and political circumstances, the preservation of the old city therefore appears by necessity to be an act of class struggle, as an appropriation of society’s built heritage by the working class and its allies, guided by the communist administration. While this argument, without doubt, was present in the debate during the seventies, less is known on how that relationship in Bologna had been perceived and treated earlier.
Most commonly, and in line with what the administrators and architects themselves wrote on the subject, historiography has put a strong accent on the rupture with the past that had marked urban planning in Bologna in the sixties and seventies.593 But as Patrizia Gabellini stated already in 1988, such emphasis can also be misleading, as it tends to obscure continuities which existed as well: also prior to 1960, the municipality had been committed to social housing and public services in favor of low income groups, had paid attention to the evolvement of town planning legislation and was willing to put to good use the opportunities it offered.594 Regarding the city center, the rupture seems obvious: while the fifties had produced a plan envisaging large-scale demolitions, the sixties brought a change of attitude towards the built heritage which eventually led to the protection and renewal of the centro storico.595 But how did this change occur? And how did it relate to the social and political objectives of urban planning for the city center?
In a necessarily limited manner, the present article reconsiders Bologna’s plans for the old city between 1955 and 1975. Focusing in particular on the development of preservation concepts and the issue of working class and lower-middle-class housing in the old city, it intends to trace possible changes in both, and furnish some ideas on why these changes may have occurred.
The point of departure for the plans for the city center of the sixties and seventies was the Piano Regolatore Generale (General Plan) that Bologna’s city council had adopted by autumn 1955. Elaborated under the responsibility of the architect Plinio Marconi, who had been involved in Bologna’s urban planning since the thirties, this plan in urban historiography is remembered mostly as obsessed with the city’s expansion and the requirements of motorized traffic.596 This reading is definitely not wrong. In theory, the plan allowed for a million inhabitants and, with regards to new streets and neighborhoods, did not consider the city center an equally urgent field of intervention.597 Under the name of vecchio nucleo cittadino, it was identified as the area within the former city walls constructed during the fourteenth century.598
The planners’ attitudes towards the city center were quite ambivalent. On the one hand, it was overloaded, run down, and not appropriate to contemporary requirements, as defined by the planners. On the other hand, they acknowledged also the center’s aesthetic and historic values, expressly including vernacular historic buildings.599
The plan was thus presented as a compromise solution. The creation of a business district in the war afflicted northern and north-western zones and a decentralization of various functions were to provide a degree of relief to the most central areas. At the same time the center was to be further adapted to contemporary requirements, which would translate into a considerable number of demolitions within the historic fabric. A number of projects to further »valorize« the city center proposed a partial or complete isolation of selected monumental sites.600 Besides, the plan mentioned the possibility of defining special regulations for zone con particolari caratteristiche ambientali ed edilizie (zones with particular building and environmental characteristics). A demarcation line was defined that limited building heights within those zones of the center which had been less afflicted by fascist era projects and war destruction.601
The plan contained a program for the redevelopment of run-down inner-city residential areas, defining 27 zone di risanamento. The regulations were rather generic.602 In streets with scenographic value, in appearance linked to the presence of arcades, the façades were to be preserved, as opposed, in particular, to irregular buildings in the rear areas. In some cases, a complete demolition was expected. A particular difficulty the plan mentioned was the fragmented property structure and the irregular form of the plots. The question of what to do with the current inhabitants and owners was not clearly addressed.603 But a slight population decrease within the old city was expected.604 The city council’s debate and official publications as well show that inhabitants were to be transferred to new public housing neighborhoods on the outskirts of town. The measure was discussed as a social benefit.605
The plan was discussed passionately. While in theory the city council agreed almost unanimously on the need to preserve an image of the old city that was considered beautiful and historically valuable, only the small groups of the Liberals and the Social Democrats fundamentally opposed demolitions in the city center.606 The Christian Democrats’ (DC) critique emphasized other aspects.607 The cohesive vote of the Communists and the Socialists assured the plan’s adoption.608
But it soon became clear that the characteristics of the city center were a sensitive issue to a maybe small, but influential portion of Bologna’s citizens, as well as to certain branches of the state administration. During the plan’s legal appeal period and, as Luca Baldissara has pointed out, in the midst of the campaign for the municipal elections of 1956, Bologna’s former chief conservationist Alfredo Barbacci, interviewed by the local newspaper Il Resto del Carlino, judged the plans as an »earthquake« worse than the bombings of the Second World War.609 The Arts Council of the Ministry of Public Instruction, of whom Barbacci was a member, asked for a revision of the center’s plans and pointed out the significance of monumental ensembles.610 When the plan was approved by national authorities in April 1958, the decree of approval characterized it as not in line with the current state of town planning and prescribed a close synchronization of further interventions in the city center with the Soprintendenza ai Monumenti.611
By the end of the fifties it was obvious that the plan would not furnish an effective concept for the city center. It proposed solutions of admittedly temporary character, since future demolitions to suit the needs of traffic were already predicted.612 In consequence the city administrators soon initiated a first revision of the plan’s contents. On 14 September 1960, two months before the municipal elections, the city council adopted, by unanimous vote, a number of variants on the plan’s technical norms. These aimed, among other things, at a better protection of the city center’s environmental characteristics from profit-oriented demolitions.613 The Christian Democrats pointed out that the historic-artistic zones mentioned in the 1955 plan still had not been defined. But it doesn’t seem as if the issue of working-class and lower-middle-class housing in the city center had been of great importance during the whole process.614
At the beginning of the sixties, the larger cultural and political framework which determined Bologna’s old city planning was affected by at least three interrelated factors of change.
The first was a revaluing of heritage. Since the end of the war, a massive and often chaotic process of urbanization had caused the devastation of many historic-artistic and natural heritage sites in Italy. But in turn, there was also a new kind of preservationist mobilization by part of the civil society, most notably represented by the association Italia Nostra, formed in 1956, and through the engaged journalism of Antonio Cederna.615 Just as Barbacci had observed, the public debate turned towards the preservation of historic urban fabrics, and also to the social realities connected to it.616 One key event within this process was a conference that took place in the town of Gubbio from September 17 to 19, 1960.617 Organized by experts as well as the eight municipalities—Ascoli Piceno, Bergamo, Erice, Ferrara, Genoa, Gubbio, Perugia, and Venice—it led to the foundation of the Associazione nazionale per i centri storico artistici (National Association for the historic-artistic centers—ANCSA) in 1961.618
Its final declaration, the Carta di Gubbio, addressing methodological, administrative, social and juridical aspects, had a profound impact on the national debate.619 It defined the risanamento conservativo (i. e. preservation and restoration) of the entire historic city within the frame of municipal planning as the only responsible way to deal with old city centers. Its restoration criteria spoke out against historicist or style purifying reconstructions, the insertion of new buildings and the isolation of monuments within the historic fabric as well as strategic demolitions to reduce its density.620 Preliminary historic-morphological studies should guarantee reasonable compromises between the preservation of the old buildings’ inner structures and the necessity to create functional residential units. Inhabitants of redevelopment zones should be able to opt for the reoccupation of their old houses and workshops. But the idea of a socially-minded redevelopment also had to deal with a contradiction. It was highlighted that by applying contemporary planning standards to premodern vernacular architecture, operations of risanamento conservativo would necessarily reduce the number of rooms—and therefore inhabitants—regardless of private profit interests. Finally, a legal reform should, both juridically and financially, enable the municipalities to recover their historic centers, also by resorting to public housing funds.621
The issue of a reform of town planning legislation was the second major factor of change. It was by no means an appendix to the question of the heritage preservation. Rather on the contrary, the struggle for the riforma urbanistica, conducted in the first place by the Istituto Nazionale di Urbanistica (National Institute for Urban Planning—INU) was one of the most central issues in the sixties and seventies Italian debate on urban planning. Crucial to its cause was the claim for a juridical separation of land property from land use rights that should provide an effective primacy of the public interest over private enterprise and speculation, hardly guaranteed by the existing legislation. Especially after the DC had in 1963 blocked a bill by their own minister Fiorentino Sullo which had proposed legislative measure towards that goal, the riforma urbanistica, in terms of party politics, was associated almost exclusively with the political left.622
The third factor of change, finally, was a policy change of the PCI, the major left wing party, known as rinnovamento (renewal). Put very briefly, the rinnovamento was an answer to the political crisis of Italian communism following the revealing of the crimes of Stalinism at the CPSU’s XX Congress, the Soviet intervention in Hungary in 1956, and socio-economic and political developments on the national scale.623 In an attempt to mediate the PCI’s somewhat contradictory reality as a democratic mass party with the revolutionary ideals of communism and to further extend the party’s influence towards the middle class, older revolutionary scenarios were replaced by a democratic program of structural reforms.624 It was within this theoretical and political frame, where the struggle for the riforma urbanistica identified as a struggle for a structural reform, that the PCI reassessed town planning matters, which, given the party’s difficult relationship with the conservative-dominated national authorities, were also held in high regard as a field of local democracy.625 The implementation of the reformist line of a via italiana al socialismo was confirmed by and large at the PCI’s VIII Congress in December 1956. It went along with a partial recomposition of the cadre. In Emilia-Romagna, a regional conference paved the way for the rinnovatori only by June 1959.626
Bologna, a communist stronghold, was of particular importance in this picture, and considered by the party a model city.627 By decision of the party leadership, the Roman architect and PCI member Giuseppe Campos Venuti became assessore all’urbanistica after the municipal elections of November 1960.628 Up to then the local PCI had regarded town planning, as Gabellini has noted, as a rather technical matter. It had entrusted it to experts unsuspected of any left wing sympathies, who generally reproposed with minor changes what they had been elaborating since the thirties.629 In contrast, Campos Venuti’s program was founded on a critical analysis of the city’s political economy and centered around the possibilities of subverting capitalist land rent. Now, the very content of a plan was seen to express a defined political will. It aimed at strengthening public control and use of urban land and developing larger scale economic and territorial planning units to counter regional imbalances, beginning with an inter-municipal plan (piano intercomunale). It also proved decisive for the old city.630
It was after the arrival of Campos Venuti that Bologna adopted the causes of the riforma urbanistica and the centri storici debate for its own planning policy.631 When in 1962 he helped to prevent the demolition of a former church dating from the seventeenth century in the city center, this appeared as a turning point in Bologna’s preservation policy.632 That same year, the municipality joined the ANCSA633 and brought on its way the indagine settoriale sul centro storico, i. e. a study on the historic center, which served as a blueprint to the 1969 Piano per il Centro Storico (Plan for the Historic Center).634
The sectoral study, owing its name to its connection with the piano intercomunale, was carried out by a research group from the University of Florence guided by Leonardo Benevolo, and published in 1965.635 Inspired by the pattern outlined in the Gubbio Charter, it presented a historic-morphological analysis of the old city and proposed criteria for its preservation and proper use. Regarding the state of preservation, the study did not oversee the numerous historicist interventions from the late nineteenth century onwards, which, as the authors noted, conferred a »subtle sense of adulteration« indelible to the character of contemporary Bologna.636 But it affirmed that the center had preserved much of his premodern aspect and proposed its subdivision into two diverse zones, one of which of historic-artistic relevance—thus reproducing, in fact, the demarcation line already present in the 1955 plan.637 The study grouped the existing building stock into three main categories: scientific restoration, the preservation of exterior characteristics, and demolition. Underlining that they would have to correspond to preservation goals, proper modes of use were identified with public, representative, cultural, residential and certain commercial and economic functions. Military, industrial and large-scale administrative and business functions were considered inappropriate and were to be decentralized, i. e. transferred to sites outside the historic center. As for the renewal of dilapidated neighborhoods, the study shared the 1955 plan’s focus on »irrational« lots and to maintain or recover open spaces in the rear areas. Possible effects for the actual inhabitants were not discussed in detail. But anticipating a population decrease of about 20 per cent in the historic zone, it was clear the authors expected renewal to be accompanied by a strong social recomposition.638
The Plan for the Historical Center was adopted in July 1969 as a variante to the 1955 general plan.639 In the meantime, a state commission had officially recognized the importance of preserving the centri storici.640 In Bologna, Armando Sarti (PCI) continued the work of Campos Venuti, who had left the office in 1966.641 But the juridical and financial problems of municipal risanamento conservativo were still unresolved.642
The plan, elaborated on by the municipality’s planners, aimed at physically preserving the entire historic city and integrating it into the city’s general development in a functional and proper way. So not only did it define preservation and restoration criteria, it also proposed a range of interventions in order to define the center’s proper modes of use, increase its socio-economic value, and improve its public services, in particular by reusing monumental buildings (mostly ex monasteries) for public and social purposes. Furthermore, the plan identified 13 so called comparti di risanamento (Ill. 1) as subject to public intervention.643 It was a complex piece of work, whose innovative character, as has been stated by Harald Bodenschatz and Tilman Harlander, was not for the least part due to its capacity to combine hitherto isolated elements of planning.644
The plan’s contents were in part new and in part can be traced back to earlier stages of planning. The sectoral study provided the definition of the centro storico and its historical argumentation: the old city was seen as one single monumental ensemble, the result of a historic process which had irrevocably come to an end with the industrial age. The task of the contemporaries was its active preservation and appropriate use. Preservation categories and schemes of use were adapted from the sectoral study with minor changes. Open spaces within the historic zone, in part empty lots due to war destructions, were declared protected.645
The Plan for the Historic Center shared also some common ground with the 1955 plan. Both plans shared the concept of functional decentralization, which in the sixties had been completed by plans for a new centro direzionale (business district) outside the city center. The 1969 plan’s definition of two zones of the center, the historic zone A and the modern zone B, reechoed the 1955 demarcation line. The 13 comparti di risanamento, too, show some similarity with the 27 zones of 1955, even if the numbering differed and the inclusion of the two comparti San Leonardo and San Carlo was entirely new—not to mention the preservation concept, which clearly made a crucial difference.646
But there were also new elements. From a methodological view, one important novelty was typology.647 The deep and narrow building lots, which had for a good part determined the premodern vernacular architecture, had hitherto been mainly discussed as a problem for a rational redevelopment. Now they came to be considered an integral part of the heritage that was to be preserved.648
A second new element, which distinguished the plan from both, the 1955 plan and the 1965 sectoral study, was its marked political tone reflecting the PCI line. Capitalist economy was identified as the main reason for the ongoing degradation of heritage sites in Italy. A truly effective solution for the centri storici, it was stated, would require a new town planning law which would have to assume the character of a structural reform. So, apart from preserving the old city, the 1969 plan was also an attempt to claim the question of the historic centers as a genuine field of communist policy on the local scale.649
The social perspectives of the inhabitants remained somewhat contradictory, just as they had been in the Gubbio Charta. The plan announced further research on the social conditions that was to precede interventions. That said, for the entire historic zone (A), in 1967 home to 71,000 people, a further population decrease of about 10.000 inhabitants was expected.650 At the same time, the plan spoke of social conservation and the participation of the inhabitants to assure a social control of the operation.651
Within the span of roughly a decade, Bologna’s plans for the city center had thoroughly changed. The 1969 Piano per il Centro Storico, combining the preservation of the entire premodern city with its functional reorganization focussed on public and social interests and the creation of political pressure for the riforma urbanistica, was among the most advanced practical outcomes of the centri storici debate. But it suffered from at least two problems. The first one was how to deal, socially and politically, with the expected decrease of housing space. The second one was the still unresolved legal situation of old city renewal, whose results were not easily foreseeable. In fact, its adoption by the end of July 1969 was followed by a phase which, once again, brought substantial changes to the political and juridical framework of urban planning, which in turn affected content and implementation of the plan itself.
On a national level, social struggles and strikes had been on the increase since 1968. On 19 November, 1969, the three union confederations CGIL, CISL and UIL had called for a general strike whose central demand was for political action to end the degrading housing conditions under which a good part of the working class suffered. With an estimated participation of 19 million people, the sciopero per la casa (strike for housing) created pressure for a reform of urban planning and public housing.652 The law Number 865 of October, 1971, which was one of its principal results, also affected the centri storici question. The so-called legge per la casa met the reformist demands only in part. But it facilitated the expropriation of areas for public utility within the historic centers.653 The importance now conferred to the question of the centri storici was also reflected by an experimental program for public interventions within historic centers created by GESCAL (Gestione case per i lavoratori), a corporation of public housing, by the summer of 1972. Bologna was among the eleven municipalities chosen for the program.654
On the local scale, the revision process of the 1955 General Plan had been concluded with the adoption of a general variant in 1970.655 The new instrument not only united different sectoral variants adopted before, among which was the Piano per il Centro Storico. It also intended to limit the further urban expansion by imposing stricter and more socially oriented planning standards, allowing for a maximum population of 600,000.656 But it soon turned out that urban growth, hitherto hardly controllable in Bologna like in other Italian cities, had reached a peak. Instead of the expected continuous process of economic and residential concentration to be countered by measures of restriction and decentralization aiming at an equilibrated and functionally mixed metropolitan development, Bologna experienced an increasing transfer of industry and working-class population to the surrounding municipalities, becoming itself increasingly dominated by a growing tertiary sector.657 In consequence, some of the interpretative and operative patterns developed in the sixties were put under scrutiny.658
Additionally, the municipal elections of 1970 had produced a slight decrease in the communist vote.659 Following the elections, the assessorato all’urbanistica passed from Armando Sarti to the Socialist Luigi Colombari. The architect Pier Luigi Cervellati, an ex-member of the Benevolo study group who had entered the administration as an independent candidate on the PCI list in 1964, now took charge of the assessorato all’edilizia pubblica e privata, to whom the issue of the centro storico was entrusted. Also due to these changed responsibilities, in planning policy, the PCI’s discussion on Bologna’s economic structural change coincided with a focus of the communist administrators on the city center.660 It also had not passed unnoticed that the PCI vote had been relatively weak there too.661
Due to this specific correlation of different factors working class housing gained importance within the plans for the centro storico, and, in turn, the plans for the centro storico gained importance in relation to other branches of municipal planning.662
In the summer of 1971, a study had shown the particularly sharp social segregation of the old city. Its rather high-priced zones stood in marked contrast to deplorable social and hygienic conditions especially within the 13 comparti di risanamento, five of which were now prioritized for public intervention.663 Cervellati characterized the historic centre as the area where the contradictions of capitalist development concentrated most.664 After the legge per la casa of October 1971, and in response to what, at a local party conference in December, had been defined as the old city’s deproletarizzazione,665 Cervellati and his colleagues developed an ambitious plan to finally intervene in the comparti.
In October 1972, the plan for social housing in the city center, PEEP / Centro Storico, was presented.666 Already in 1963, Campos Venuti had tried to insert two central areas in the first PEEP plan. But this had been mainly a symbolic gesture in order to problematize the unresolved legal questions of urban renewal.667 The 1972 plan was different. Backed by an extensive interpretation of the legge per la casa, the municipality planned to expropriate five of the comparti, redevelop the buildings and assign them to the original inhabitants under the new legal form of housing cooperatives with undivided property.668
The PEEP / Centro Storico intended not only to promote further legislative reforms and to reduce social segregation. Formulating redevelopment as a promising alternative to the often little attractive new social housing neighborhoods in the periphery, it also wanted to provide an alternative to traditional schemes of urban growth.669 Interestingly enough, its emphasis on the social cause led the PEEP / Centro Storico to partially contradict the 1969 Piano per il Centro Storico. While in 1969 there had seemed no alternative to a further decrease of population, in 1972 even an increase of the inhabitants was envisaged.670 The open spaces deemed as irreclaimable in 1969 now were to serve for the temporary homes, intended for the inhabitants to stay during the rebuilding of their houses.671 The method proposed for the construction of these so-called case albergo was defined in 1972 as ripristino tipologico (typological reconstruction). In 1969, conceiving the centro storico as a completed historical process, its further »completion« had been out of the question. From a tool to analyze historic buildings, typology was thus turned into an allegedly objective method for building new houses in historical style (Ill. 2). The relation between the monumental ensemble and its proper use as well as the understanding of risanamento conservativo were profoundly modified.672
The plan’s practical and political limits soon became obvious. What particularly sparked off controversies was, for the moment, not so much its debatable concept of closing gaps in the historic urban fabric. The plan’s limitations to private property produced resistance not only by conservatives, but also by the local PCI itself. Given the party’s local electorate and membership structure with a large share of lower middle class, the expropriation of small apartment owners—the vast majority of the owners within the comparti—was, in political terms, a lost cause. The debate and its outcomes were shaped by the fact that the PEEP / Centro Storico was mainly a project of Cervellati’s assessorato, from which the PCI and the rest of the administration distanced themselves when its potential for strife became obvious.673
The plan was adopted by spring 1973 only with substantial changes. Instead of expropriating, the municipality bought the houses or came to terms with the owners by means of contracts to favor and control redevelopment. A contract scheme was adopted after long negotiations by April 1975.674 The municipal elections of 1975 proved a great success for the PCI.675 But the plan’s implementation proceeded slower than expected.676 The law Number 457 / 1978 (the so-called piano decennale per la casa) improved the municipality’s financial possibilities for urban renewal. As a planning instrument, however, the PEEP / Centro Storico was cancelled in 1980. The redevelopment of its five comparti was transferred into five single plans (piani di recupero particolareggiato), which were terminated in 1983.677 A proper analysis of the social costs and benefits of the PEEP / Centro Storico experience has so far not been published.678 Beyond doubt, its outcomes were rather disillusioning when compared to the hopes it had nurtured when it was first presented. However, according to Roberto Scannavini, one of the authors of the Piano per il Centro Storico and the Peep / Centro Storico, Bologna’s attempt to protect low-income groups in the old city was at least of limited success.679 Beyond Bologna, the PEEP / Centro Storico’s preservation concept was confirmed by the Council of Europe in 1974.680 It was nonetheless also subject to professional critique, which centered around the methodology of ripristino tipologico.681
As I have shown above, the planning process which led from Bologna’s 1955 General Plan to the preservation plans of the sixties and early seventies was twofold, comprising both elements of continuity and discontinuity alike. On the one hand, it is very clear that in the sixties a decisive change of direction happened, with the concept of risanamento conservativo of the entire centro storico taking the place of the 1955 planning scheme. On the other hand, it seems that the 1955 plan, with all its shortcomings, cannot be seen as an exclusively negative point of reference for later planning. In contrast, while the plan undoubtedly represented an objective threat to the historic city, it also marked a stage within the evolvement of the municipality’s awareness towards the city’s built heritage that has left traces also in later plans, however with a different marching direction.
Shaped by a planning policy closely tied to the strategic and theoretic debate of the Communist Party, the sixties and seventies were obviously characterized by a strong continuity, as opposed to the more »technical« approach of the fifties. But it should not be forgotten, that also during this period, the planning schemes for the historic city underwent several transformations, which not only regarded the assessment of the social and political dimensions of old city renewal, but were also affected by them. In the sixties, it was clearly assumed that preservation would require compromises on a social level. To save both, the old city and its actual inhabitants, in a literal sense, was therefore a concept of the seventies. The same goes for the typological reconstructions, which, however limited in quantity, remained methodologically highly controversial and may have prefigured waves of postmodernism and historical reconstructions yet to come.
Its pronounced social momentum places the PEEP / Centro Storico concept within the particular climate of Italy’s early seventies, characterized by high social and political tension and the incipient economic structural change. But it should not be overlooked that it was also an attempt by experts to resolve, what had been a contradiction within the centri storici debate already in 1960: how could the preservation of the historic urban fabric be put into practice without expelling working-class and lower-middle-class residents? In terms of timing and ideas, it corresponded with the large social mobilization of the Italian left after 1968–69. However, it was not itself a direct outcome of social struggles or mass mobilization, but emerged from a specific, institutional alliance between politically engaged architects and the municipality. The plans for the old city and their implementation had to take into account changing juridical, political, and social circumstances. They did so by formulating new ideas and solutions, but it seems worth remembering that they also resorted to what earlier stages of local planning had produced.