The Urban Regeneration of Detention Spaces: The Case Study of the Bolzano Prison

Urban regeneration requires a new look, attentive to social phenomena and their implications, even in relation to issues apparently distant from the community, such as prisons. There is a great opportunity in Italy for repurpose and redevelopment, linked to the disposal of old prison properties or prisons no longer able to ensure the necessary spaces and conditions to guarantee humanity and the dignity of the sentence. These buildings, often of architectural value, due to their size and location in the urban fabric can play an important role in the revitalization of historic centers. Another pressing issue is prison overcrowding. In many Italian territories, processes are underway to remove prisons from inhabited centers: the choice of the greatest possible distance, however, risks generating new forms of marginalization, discrimination and spatial and social isolation. The aim of the paper is to reflect on prison space and prison design as a space compatible with human and environmental health, in the idea of a new “empowering” prison model, which guarantees the prisoner a new centrality. The imprisoned person must be able to become an active subject of the fulfillment of the sentence so that it can become an opportunity for redemption, capable of guaranteeing conditions that conform to humanity and dignity and above all relations with the social, economic and environmental contexts of reference. The architectural project, as a form of knowledge, has the dutiful task of contributing to the change of course, dictating the rules and modes of coexistence of everyday environments. The question of the architectural quality of the prison is a complex issue that concerns both the search for innovative spatial models and the urgent need for adaptation and redevelopment of the existing heritage, as well as the forecasting of new interventions in the territory for urban regeneration. It is within this framework that the Bolzano case study is placed, whose prison turns out to be a structure absolutely unsuitable for a detention that respects human rights. The main problems associated with this reality are due to the scarcity of human and financial resources, but above all to the inefficiency and inadequacy of the spaces. The contribution analyzes the scenarios of the progressive decommissioning of the current prison, starting from the municipality's forecast of a new construction outside the historical center. This solution will make it possible to study innovative spaces, with a focus on the single dimension of the prisoner. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024.