Quartiere e integrazione sociale
Edoardo Preger
Neighbourhoods are places where people live an important part of their lives, and they represent the setting for the school experience. The social composition of the neighbourhood directly shapes that of children attending kindergarten and compulsory school, and affects the quality of cultural exchange. This paper investigates the origins of neighbourhoods after the industrial revolution, when cities lost their unitary character, from a functional and social point of view, and split into many specialized and separated districts. In Italy, as in the rest of Europe, the new working-class neighbourhoods were created on the outskirts of towns, hosting the weakest social groups. These new neighbourhoods had few services and were far away from work, commercial and cultural places. Nowadays, new city planning aims to reshape the town by working on many issues: promoting a broader social mix in the neighbourhoods, with the presence of different social classes; creating urban-level services in the suburbs, capable of ending their subordination to town centres; and improving transport services and bringing quality and beauty to every part of the city, not only to historical centres.
