Throughout the last few decades, the regeneration of large parts of cities has occupied first place in the discourse on architecture and urban planning, with cases multiplying, where the destiny of industrial spaces and disused areas has been rewritten, transforming them into new poles of culture, art and social interaction. In Europe, specifically, cases have multiplied in which a single project has been the driving force behind regeneration processes, often becoming the symbol of a place or a story.
“Cities”, in fact, “are mankind’s greatest creation,” said Richard Rogers, and from Hamburg to Lisbon, European cities are reinventing themselves, not only as centres of architectural innovation, but also as places where the old and the new coexist to generate new meanings and functions, also profoundly transforming the way we experience public spaces.
The challenge today, after almost half a century of regenerative interventions, mainly on post-industrial areas, has become not only to renovate abandoned spaces, but to make them alive, inclusive, capable of welcoming the diversity and unpredictability of human interactions. This is not a simple building act, but a form of cultural narration, shaping the collective memory and future of cities.
We have therefore selected some of the most emblematic examples of urban regeneration in Europe. From the “Bilbao effect” of Gehry's Guggenheim Museum to the Tietgenkollegiet habitat in Copenhagen, Herzog & de Meuron in Hamburg and London, Renzo Piano and OMA, Turin, Antwerp and Tirana, we borrow the words of American sociologist Richard Sennett in discovering how “architecture is not only the construction of physical spaces, but it is the social fabric that derives from them”.