Boca abierta: healing the scar-city through the rediscovery of its identity

The requalification of the area of La Boca in Buenos Aires: a periphery along the river This Master Degree thesis deals with a peripherical area of one of the biggest metropolis in the world, Buenos Aires. The first step concerns the analysis of the urban conglomeration, its development and its actual problems, followed by a deeper scan of the neighborhood: La Boca, the first settlement of the city, is now located along the southern border and presents several problems, similar to all the occidental cities, trying to face the recent crisis and the consequential closure of all the factories activities that enhance the spread of empty places and the need to rethink these huge spaces to convert them into hubs for new functions, avoiding the expansion of the urban tissue. Other issues are related to the multicultural feature of the city, that received in the last years new flows of inmigrants from the closest countries, representing a sort of South-American dream being one of the last chances of economic survival for the low-income people. For these reasons the neighbourhood has changed its morphological features from its foundation to the last years, adapting the needs of the population through a partial reuse of existent infrastructures and buildings, decreasing the comfort to a situation of just survival. The presence of the river Riachuelo, threating the maintenance of decent living conditions, especially for the people living under the highway, can represent the starting point for the process of renewal, which is proposed by this work. The approach chosen is not the usual in Latin America, consisting in demolishing to rebuilt something new, but it is conservative, in a way that not only provides the reuse of existent buildings, but also focuses its efforts to obtain an adaptation to the needs and the ideas of the users. It’s not a rewriting on the present but a new draw of the future aims. Through the recreation of a waterfront as reappropriation of a public space actually almost abandoned and the conferment of social functions, the neighbourhood enrich itself with a new hope of getting out the decline and relive, especially thanks to the tourism still looking for the authenticity represented by its buildings and streets. At the same time, the need of basic life needs is solved by turning the abandoned depots into shelters and canteens, beside cultural spots represented by museums and laboratories to transmit the traditional arts of the locals. In this process the main role is handled by the population, that needs to be involved in all the stages of the design, from the identification of the most important characteristics that the neighbourhood has to consider and develop, to the actual and concrete realization of the works, guided by associations and stakeholders able to keep at the first place the needs expressed.