Vezio De Lucia: “Italy was beautiful. We can go back to it with the regeneration of cities”

Vezio De Lucia, born in 1938, is a sweet gentleman. However, behind his meekness there is an iron spirit, a rigorous, sober thought, without ostentation and without vanity. One could almost say severe. He is a great urban planner, an intellectual, a politician. His latest book is called “Italy was beautiful” and narrates the events of the cities and the landscape in republican Italy.

He comes from a family originally from Buccino, a small town in Cilento, where his father practiced the profession of veterinarian and where he, Vezio, lived his childhood years. Then the whole family moved to Naples, for the boys’ schools.

Why Vezio?
“I never knew. My grandfather was called Emilio and in fact my name is Vezio Emilio, then only Vezio remained”.

Was architecture a vocation?
“Quite the opposite. When I enrolled at the university, in Naples, I left the choice of faculty blank. I oscillated between humanities, literature, history, philosophy and sometimes I regret not having made that choice, and geology, the petroleum, energy. Then I ended up in architecture, perhaps because I had studied the classics at the Genovesi in Piazza del Gesù and architecture was just a stone’s throw away, I felt like I was staying at home. Besides, I’ve never been an architect”.

How did you choose between architecture and urban planning?
“Life, interests. Architecture was big names, the faculty was infested with an artistry that disturbed me, and then in the architect’s activity there is a client and a work, in urban planning there is social life , there’s politics. And on the other hand, studying urban planning in the faculty of architecture is an Italian thing, in France, for example, it’s linked to geography”.

After graduation?
“I started out as a university assistant but soon realized it wasn’t for me. I took a train and went to Rome where I discovered to my great surprise that finding work was very easy, there were even advertisements in the newspapers looking for architects. I also got in touch with the company who would later build the Costa Smeralda but in the end I chose the Roman Institute of Beni Stabili, a colossus that managed an immense patrimony of rental properties.Perhaps even in that choice the location counted, my office was a corner room of the Galleria Colonna, from the window I could see the rooms of Palazzo Chigi”.

He made a career.
“I risked doing it, after a few months they offered me the responsibility of the development office and I understood that I would have to deal with large building speculations”.

What opened her eyes?
“The collapse of the center of Agrigento, the great landslide of 1966. There were no deaths because it had been an announced event but somehow it marked a turning point. The Minister of Public Works, the socialist Giacomo Mancini, appointed the director general of the ministry Michele Martuscelli to write a report on what had happened Martuscelli produced an exemplary document in which he explained that at the origin of the fragility of that territory there was building speculation, which was the disease of Agrigento as of almost all of our country, it was so in Rome, in Naples, in Palermo. For the first time public opinion knew how our cities were developing. I resigned from Beni Stabili and took part in the competition for urban planning that the ministry had announced, I arrived first, I went to work with Martuscelli and I began my ministerial career”.

A trauma?
“Quite the opposite. They were the years of reforms, the secondary school reform, the nationalization of electricity, urban planning reform was one of the great myths of the moment”.

But it never came.
“Never. The Agrigento landslide, however, paved the way for the Ponte Law, so-called because it was supposed to lead us to urban reform and anticipated some important pieces of it, such as the urban standards with which parameters were set, many square meters of greenery per inhabitant, many parking lots, so many public spaces, was a first affirmation of citizens’ right to the city. I was one of the authors of that text which has since marked the subsequent history of urban planning. Mancini was probably not impeccable in the management of his college but he was a true reformist, and this was not recognized to him”.

Why has urban reform never arrived?
“There were the enormous interests of landowners and builders and it would have required a strength and cohesion of politics that did not exist. Then, with the transfer of urban planning to the regions, there was no longer a national policy for cities “.

We have the damage under our eyes.
“There have been exceptions, however. With La Pira mayor of Florence and Dozza mayor of Bologna, excellent things have been done. The councilor for urban planning of the Dozza junta was Giuseppe Campos Venuti and his successor Pier Luigi Cervellati owes the plan for the historic center of Bologna which established two fundamental principles: that the historic center as a whole should be protected as a monument in itself and that it should not be distorted sociologically but that it should be the place for investment in social housing. history was a unitary block because before reinforced concrete and steel it was built more or less as Antonio Cederna had been in the time of the pharaohs. Campos Venuti and Cervellati realized that concept and paved the way. Italy is the country that has better protected the integrity of its historic centers and the havoc that occurred from the end of the war until then were blocked”.

He said town planning is politics. Did you do politics?
“I had neither a membership nor was I a militancy, my political culture was primitive. But politics was in the choices, urban planning is a social science, it concerns the life of people and communities, it touches gigantic interests and the choices that they mark the territory for centuries”.

How did he become a communist?
“In those years of the first centre-left, to say town planning was to say Socialist Party and I, in the Ministry of Public Works, was in a formidable center of power. I knew everyone and I was amazed by the fact that great town planners, such as Edoardo Detti in Florence or Giovanni I abstain in Turin, who were also councilors, they were constantly involved in ferocious struggles also and above all internal, internal to their party. They were spearheads but internal struggles made the PSI seem unbearable to me. The communists were in the minority, their leaders were Campos Venuti and Edoardo Salzano, and it seemed to me that the situation in those parts was calmer. The majority idea at the time was that urban planning was the development of the city, their idea was instead that urban planning was the care of the city starting from the existing”.

She was also town planning commissioner, in Naples, in the first junta of Antonio Bassolino.
“It was a good experience, we did important things, for example saving Bagnoli from overbuilding. Naples with the council of Maurizio Valenzi and then with Antonio Bassolino made important urban choices. Its master plan is the only one in a large Italian city that it does not include land consumption, which today should be the number one rule of any land-use plan”.

How you do it?
“Just take the map of the city and with a marker draw the line between the built and the unbuilt and establish that where it is not built it is no longer possible to build”.

Simple to say.
“Today it is even easier to do. The demographic push is gone and we are full of volumes that can be regenerated to serve the demand for housing that still exists. Environmental sensitivity has grown and it is easier to explain than overbuilding only makes it worse the situation. And finally there is the fact that even the builders have understood that the market has changed, that there are no new districts to build because there would be no one to live in them and that conversely there is a huge reconstruction work, regeneration, rehabilitation of heritage that has already been built and too often badly built. Zero soil consumption does not mean zero development, it means doing the things that are needed, which are so many. The culture of that world is changing and it is objective that today that world weighs much less”.

Looking from above or even just wandering the streets, however, it seems that the damage has been done.
“It’s true, we’ve gone from intensive and mindless overbuilding to low-density overbuilding, cities are fraying, in many places there is no longer the boundary between city and countryside. But much can still be saved, especially as volumes there’s no need for new ones.”

In your latest book “Italy was beautiful” you say that there are no conditions to intervene in depth. What are these conditions?
“The urban condition is not satisfactory but it is no longer central. There are no longer recognized protagonists, there are no more resources, without public spending there is not the financial mass necessary to intervene, in fact, in depth. And there is no long thinking is more. Urban planning must look far, the horizons span decades and decades and we need a vision on which stable political thought depends, which at times it was with the twentieth century parties and which instead is not with the parties of the third millennium”.

What does it mean to intervene in depth?
“Essentially to restore the suburbs, eliminate the load of negativity that disqualifies them, take pieces of the city and redo them. Public spending should be the starting point, it should graft quality hotbeds in degraded areas which would then activate virtuous actions also in private individuals. But we would need a reference model, resources, administrative skills and above all trust.

Trust in whom?
“Interlocutors, above all public. Let’s think of degraded neighborhoods: many are children of public housing but the degradation does not depend on the formal quality because they are often the work of very good architects, it depends on the non-strict housing assignments, on the occupations and abandonment that it resulted”.

To us today even the less valuable pieces of our historical centers seem beautiful but perhaps to their contemporaries they seemed as ugly as our suburbs seem to us today. Is it possible that they acquire dignity with old age? That to future generations they look beautiful?
“I doubt it. Nine tenths of the urbanized space in almost all of our country has been built in the last seventy years without form and without rules, between illegality and speculation, very often without care and without quality and the cities are shapeless, without perceptible borders with the countryside. We need to work so that they acquire dignity in the present”.