Fruizione e accessibilità: nei centri storici minori: il recupero degli spazi di prossimità come valorizzazione del centro storico di Sermoneta

Starting from the case study of the historic center of Sermoneta, the intervention aims to investigate the current role of minor historic centers and study how the issue of accessibility is crucial to initiate processes of recovery and enhancement of these places. Currently, about half of these municipalities experience critical conditions and frequently depopulation due as much to economic and morphological reasons as to a series of marginalities linked to the absence of a renewal of the anthropic dimension. In this sense accessibility, in the broadest possible conception, can represent a resource for stimulating processes of social and economic growth of the territory. In an attempt to define a balance within highly stratified places between conservation instances and design intentions, the purpose of this contribution is the search for a new accessibility in line with contemporary thinking on the processes of conservation and fruition of urban spaces in minor historic centers. These are very special contexts, characterized by an urban texture that has developed over the centuries according to the method of contiguity and proximity. They have been spaces for sharing time and experience that still retain the memory of past relationships but are losing their ability to stimulate relationships between people and the knowledge produced by place. Today these relationships seem to be failing due to economic, technological and spatial factors linked to the presence of a homogenizing culture that requires new services and does not respect the urban space-function-production link, the structuring link of the morphology of these places. A culture that does not consider the multiple local identities and expressions that through the language of the historic built environment and the characteristics of the landscape have always contributed to constitute the essence of these places. There is a need to focus on a conception of accessibility that can take on a deeper meaning in heritage revitalization processes, beyond a purely normative dimension. A "cultural" accessibility that is able to hold together the territory, architectural language, cultural heritage and social participation and to refer to the historic urban space as a place of production of meaning and culture to be declined in the present to restore the co-evolutionary relationship between urbs and civitas.