Thesis title: Health Green Lab
The subject of disused former asylum institutions has always aroused considerable interest, interweaving history, collective memory and prospects for the future. These are places charged with meaning, where time seems to have crystallised between the traces of a complex past, layers of contemporary visions and as yet unexpressed potential.
The reflection this research aims to construct focuses not so much on the causes of their abandonment, widely discussed in public and academic debate, nor on their architectural restyling as an end in itself. Rather, the aim is to explore the enormous potential of their parks, vast spaces of naturalness within the city, which can be transformed into the engine of an urban regeneration that dutifully passes through a contemporary holistic approach to health as a service chain.
Health, seen as the union of body, mind, environment and society in which biological, psychological and social factors are strongly interconnected, is the thread running through this work.
The research investigates the conversion potential of former Italian psychiatric hospitals, built between the end of the 19th century and the 20th century, which today make them ideal candidates for the creation of Health Green Labs: proximity public health laboratories where natural space leaves the mere contemplative dimension and acquires a practical-therapeutic declination in the definition of landscapes of care. At the centre of this vision is the design of their parks, vast and stratified by history and meaning, which represent the key to returning these places to the community through a contemporary reinterpretation of the functions they have always hosted.
A new cycle of life that wants to redeem these places from the negative imagery of spaces of confinement and abandonment, relegated to their phase of decline and crisis in the face of the new frontiers of psychiatry, which tells nothing of the debates and research that accompanied their creation.
This vision gives this enormous natural heritage a great unexpressed potential that we have a moral duty to try to re-ab(il)it.
The work is divided into three parts: the first holds together past, present and future, traces genealogies and evolutions of the object of research but, at the same time, explores contemporary trajectories of the space of care and assistance, opening up to typological and trans-cultural comparisons that address renewed interactions between natural space and health.
The second part traces the characteristics of Health Green Labs through a trans-disciplinary comparison that redefines contemporary perspectives of health, expanding its meaning beyond the biomedical dimension. The social and environmental determinants of health integrate and contribute to the performance of Health Green Labs as indispensable factors for understanding and addressing health, social and environmental inequalities in the definition of new therapeutic landscapes.
A theoretical-design hypothesis of the Health Green Lab guides the concluding part of the research. The experimental application conducted on the former psychiatric hospital of Santa Maria della Pietà in Rome is not intended to be only a case study, but represents a possible concrete scenario to validate the theoretical premises and test the feasibility of a new approach to the redevelopment of these spaces.
This phase of the research is the direct result of the experience gained during the internship period at ASL Roma 1, within the premises of the former psychiatric hospital. This is a complex context, rich in historical and cultural stratifications, which calls for careful reflection on the memory of the place and its capacity to evolve into an open and inclusive system.
The project does not have the ambition to propose itself as a rigid model nor as a theoretical exercise. On the contrary, it wants to be a concrete attempt to outline a replicable path, deliberately adaptable and susceptible to continuous and progressive improvements with a view to generating true laboratory spaces.
This is the ambition of this work. To offer a new key to interpretation and action for the regeneration of similar contexts that goes beyond disciplinary boundaries, in which landscape, health and collective memory can offer a new paradigm for the creation of networks of collective well-being.