Necessity and legitimacy of demolitions as strategy for conservation. Reflections on twentieth and twenty-first century heritage

On the first day of September 2020, just one month after the inauguration of the new vehicular bridge designed by Renzo Piano in Genoa, the mayor of the city announced a new urban regeneration programme for the historic centre. «In a couple of weeks we will present the urban regeneration project. We will work on the ancient buildings using the “demolition strategy” (to preserve and enhance architectural and urban heritage). We are confronting with other Institutions to understand where it is possible to demolish creating new small squares and where demolish to re-build». This is not the first time that the public administration, which is in charge of the management of one of the more dense historical centres of Europe, addressed the problem of demolition. Previous Town planning Councillors, when renovation of the ancient city appeared a strategy of economic and social growth (late ‘80s and beginning ‘90s), invoked demolition as a strategy to regenerate and preserve the old city. Bruno Gabrielli, at the end of the last millennium, dared to make the proposal to demolish buildings built after the bombs (ww2), whose architectural characters were in dissonance with traditional ones. And, before him, on the occasion of the five hundredth anniversary of the discovery of America (1992), the Town planning Councillor relaunched an old idea of demolishing the loggias to “restore” the hypothetical medieval image of the city, starting from the Ripa maris.