I quartieri residenziali: utopia di città

The proposed contribution aims to show that residential neighbourhood, built in Italy after the Second World War, can be considered really “foundation city”, at least in the planning hypothesis underlying. The first part sum up the evolution of Italian residential neighbourhoods politics and explains also the reasons of some choices about the neighbourhood built and the clear differences between some Italian neighbourhoods. The second part describes two symbolic neighbourhoods, which are analysed not only by the description of the underlying theory, but also by comparing them with some utopian theories. In every neighbourhood we can see the influence given by the greatest authors of the last two centuries. According to this, we can say that all the neighbourhoods were thought as foundation cities. In every neighbourhoods we can see some symbolic features of the utopian theories: harmonization between functions, independency and creation of public places. By the way, the severity of the project and the gap between the project and the built have driven to build neighbourhoods far away from being independent cities. For this reason, in Italy, by ‘90s, rather than building new cities, it has started a new period, during which aims to get back the existing city. This new period still focuses on neighbourhoods, not as independent cities, but as parts of existing city.