Architecture and Confiscated Assets. Design Features in the Territories of the Conflict between Democracy and Crime

The article deals with the relationship between city, territory, and democracy, starting from the results of an international research, which investigated the peculiar forms of the crisis of the notion of Public in those territories that are marked by a long-date conflict between the state and mafia crime. The research questions areframed onto a perspective arguing that the territory is an elective place to read the traces built throughout the relationship between communities and illegal powers. Those questions have posed the need to investigate the set of confiscated assets by claiming the need for architectural design intervention, aiming at the spatial, linguistic, and symbolic transformations without which their transition to commons cannot be said to be fully accomplished. Referring to the municipal area of Palermo, the architectural design studios faced the background scenario constituted by the almost two thousand cases (a very underestimated number) registered by the National Agency for Seized and Confiscated Assets, and relating to the forms of the Public in a context in which democracy is en panne, where the presence of anti-democratic forces that are not only antagonistic to the state but aim to replace it, is not the exception but the rule. Until its conclusions, the paper deals with the reciprocal feeding relationship between research and design studios and concludes by opening new paths, at the crossroads between the updating of the themes of the droit à la ville and spatial justice, which look at the project as a device for emancipation.