Natural Commercial Centres: Regeneration Opportunities and Urban Challenges

In the history of European cities, public spaces always played a pivotal role, representing key places for developing social interactions and for enhancing the sense of community. Squares, commercial streets, market places as well as traditional retail and art-and-crafts areas can be considered the core of the city. The social, economic and demographic crisis and the loss of cultural identity has affected the capacity of attraction of local small retailers, giving the floor to aggressive strategies such as suburban shopping malls, centres, arcades or precinct, forming a complex of shops, movie theatres, restaurants and food courts with interconnecting walkways. Typical expressions of a globalized economy, the different categories of suburban shopping mall have transformed behaviours and paths at a large scale. One of the consequences can be identified in the loss of traditional commercial activities within the city centre, producing a situation of urban decline, mirrored by the impoverishment of public spaces. This paper suggests that, by activating the existing cultural and socio-economic capital, it is possible to undertake a successful regeneration process based on a participative approach and on public and private integrated tools. By focussing on the experience of the Centri Commerciali Naturali (Natural Commercial Centres) - established in Italy as partnership between Municipalities, cultural operators, public services providers and associations of shops owners to exploit the commercial activities in the historical centres - the ongoing research is oriented to explore successful experiences of private-public partnership to be implemented in a regeneration process of areas traditionally dedicated to retail and art-and-craft small enterprises. The paper discusses the potentiality and the criticism of the NCC as engine for the redevelopment and regeneration of the inner city abandoned retail areas. In so doing, the experience developed in Campania (Southern Italy) will be analyzed in order to show how the activation of the social capital within the framework of the CCN could contribute in renovating the traditional commercial identity of the area, supporting the public spaces regeneration process. This paper aspires to offer useful insights to all those policy makers, city managers and planners who seek to revitalise traditional market areas in European city centres.