How can you live under a bridge?

The urban area often has marginal, neglected spaces in which nobody usually lives or stays. In Bolzano, South Tyrol, there is such a space in the area below the Brenner highway bridge, but this place has been given a second chance and has gained its own identity. The pillars of the structure are painted pink, as are several of the numerous objects that furnish what appears to be a curious open-air living room. The author of this intervention is a man who calls himself Maradona and who has made this space his home, but above all has made it an inviting and well-kept place, accessible to everyone. Maradona takes care of this neglected area and arranges objects picked up from the rubbish left by people on the outskirts of the city to display them in the space under the bridge.

Through an editorial project telling Maradona’s story, the aim is to explore the concept of living ‘on the edge’ and to investigate how abandoned interstitial spaces can be given a new chance. The analysis of Maradona’s example involves a number of design fields, such as exhibit design, the connection between decoration and decorum and upcycling, touching on the relationship between design and the real world, between designers’ wishes and the end user’s point of view. At the same time, the research of this thesis project includes some studies of designers, architects and landscape architects such as Ugo La Pietra and Gilles Clément, in order to investigate the relationship between human beings and urban public spaces, especially marginal ones, and to analyse how to re-appropriate the city not only with material interventions, but also by changing mentalities and behavioural paradigms.