Taking Care of Public Spaces—Light and Bottom-Up Regeneration in Tor Bella Monaca and San Basilio

Public housing districts, such as the Roman districts of Tor Bella Monaca and San Basilio, include large public spaces: a huge resource with great unexpressed potential. In such neighborhoods, certain circumstances develop and cause the public space to malfunction, because it stops functioning as a social and experience condenser. Those places are characterized by social, economic, and work insecurities where the public administration is not very much present. This work aims at discussing self-construction and bottom-up design practices, in the Roman public housing districts of Tor Bella Monaca and San Basilio, as a possible alternative to urban regeneration projects implemented by administrations and capable of achieving positive and long lasting results, by developing place identity. The actions, even “moderate” they may be, carried out by these experiences levered to relocate the neighborhoods, bringing citizens closer to beauty and demonstrating that it is possible to reclaim public space possession and develop a sense of belonging and identity by triggering a process of permanent cure. The institutional dimension, in turn, has the duty to support virtuous initiatives, which seize the concrete opportunity to design a new urban destiny of public spaces, affecting the social, cultural, and generational aspects.