"Le prospettive infinite". Reggio 1855-1908: una difficile attuazione

The planning started in 1860 was only to all appearance the logical continuation of the Mori Plan and its operations of urban redesign. The interventions designed after the unity of Italy, coordinated by the town-planning and enlargement scheme issued in 1868, was inserted into a larger ideological and technical context. Reggio took the middle-class city european model, realizing estate strategies based in land rent and intending to maximum areas increase in value by creation and development of commercial, executive and communication poles. This influenced on the urban design, fixing priorities in the process of realization. In this way the clearance of peripheral areas, not expected by the Mori Plan, but ordered by needs and ratified by the 1885 law, even if it was topic of discussions and interventions proposals it was never realized, giving priority to the interventions on the central residential neighbourhoods. More urgent, instead, was the demand of city's enlargement, especially for the enormous population growth. The enlargement plan, with all its numerous changes, fixed definite planning and technical instructions, but its realization, braked by the opposition of proprietaries to give they properties and by the consequent legal obstacles, was roughly cutted short by the frighful 1908 earthquake. The reconstruction had to face the new needs, but the new urban planning proved from the beginning a definited will not to break with the past, preserving unchanged the most part of ideas expressed by nineteenth-century urban plans.