Abandoned Army Barracks in Friuli Venezia Giulia (Italy) as New Time-Shaped Community Landscape Potential

The dismantling of Italian Army Barracks in northeast Italy in the last 20 years has left a series of large abandoned areas where nature has freely operated as a designer, creating new transitional landscapes in places devoted during the Cold War to protecting the Italian border. We could call them ‘auto-regenerative’ landscapes. This paper aims to briefly illustrate the making of this kind of unconventional landscape in the Friuli Venezia Giulia Region over the second half of the XX century through the different scales of intervention that have activated multiple spatial relations over time. After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, this exceptional infrastructure-based landscape, adapted to the needs of the Italian Army, has been reconfigured and gradually abandoned, becoming almost completely unused from the year 2000. The authors propose a reading of these derelict spaces and formulate possible new scenarios of sustainable regeneration and inclusive reintegration that aspire to promote a kind of open project to return them as social pay-back to Friuli Venezia Giulia communities after more than 100 years of militarization.