Uuurble – A Case of Touristification: What Does the Future Hold for the Spanish Quarters?

Naples

Quarteri Spagnoli

A Case of Touristification: What Does the Future Hold for the Spanish Quarters?

Once an enclave of organized crime, the Spanish Quarter is now shedding its past and opening up to the world through a trend of touristification. The heightened interest in the Spanish Quarter primarily stems from the area's distinctive atmosphere, unique architectural style, and the unconventional experience it offers in terms of public spaces. This combination of factors differentiates the Spanish Quarter from other urban areas, making it a subject of particular intrigue and study. While touristification brings higher incomes for residents and improves the feeling of safety, it might cause an identity shift in the area, which has initially been the main reason for its attractiveness.

Introduction

The old town of Naples is the largest historic center in Europe, and has preserved its original grid patterned street network from around 400 BC. ¹ The Spanish Quarter, known as Quartieri Spagnoli, derives its name from the Spanish military garrisons stationed there during the Spanish rule of Naples in the 16th century, reflecting the area's historical and cultural ties to its colonial past. The Spanish Quarter has existed from its inception until recently as an enclave with its own dynamics, disconnected from the urban flow and with a somewhat negative reputation. ² Recently the area has been re-evaluated and has become one of the main tourist attractions of the city, where we can observe the ‘order in chaos’ lifestyle of the locals that represent the Neapolitan soul.

The Spanish Quarter is located between Castel Sant'Elmo, a medieval castle, the old town, and the harbor, adjacent to Via Toledo , one of the most important and busy commercial streets of the city, stretching from Piazza Dante to Piazza del Plebiscito . With the crowd of people carried by Via Toledo, it overflows with different densities at different times of the day.

Situated on a slope risingfrom Via Toledo to Castel Sant'Elmo, the area is composed of streets that are as multi-layered and chaotically diverse when viewed from a human scale, no matter how regular they are in the plan and consist of small blocks of five-six stories with short facades surrounded by narrow streets, The main users of the narrow streets of the Spanish Quarter are locals, tourists, and scooters. In addition to being an increasingly busy touristic attraction, this dense and complex area contains much of the daily life of the local population. While the streets reaching Via Toledo are an inviting and dense tourist area with the most diverse functions, as you move up the slope, the sense of neighborhood and locality increases and the diversity of functions is sparse. With a twenty percent foreign population, the functions and user profile of the Spanish Quarter are rapidly changing. ³

The main factor influencing the current transformation of the Spanish Quarter and the evolution of its functions is the shift of the local population towards tourist-oriented activities. The predominantly commercial areas are being filled with functions that attract more people, while in the residential areas, the number of short-term temporary stays is increasing. According to a study on the socio-economic consequences of short-term stays for Naples, before Covid, the city experienced a huge growth in tourist flows. Currently, the rising tourism challenges the daily life of the neighborhood' linked to the tourism model adopted. ⁴ The situation is raising concerns regarding how the area is coping with the change, and what will be the future of it. Before answering this question, it is essential to understand why the Spanish Quarter is experiencing this new wave of touristification.

History

The Spanish Quarter emerged in the sixteenth century when the Kingdom of Aragon wanted to reclaim its territory and expel the French troops. In order to maintaining a tight control, a garrison of about 5,000 soldiers was placed in the heart of Naples, led by the Grand Captain.

From the beginning, the presence of Spanish troops in this region brought about violence, crime and prostitution. Towards the middle of the sixteenth century, barracks were built in other parts of the city to accommodate the soldiers and space was reallocated for them.

In the following centuries, Spanish governors ruled the city and left an indelible mark on Naples. Important figures such as Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba (known as the Great Captain) and Pedro Álvarez de Toledo played a key role in the development of these neighborhoods after their arrival in Naples in 1532. Toledo's most important contribution is the street named after him, Via Toledo, that stretches for over a kilometer and serves as a focal pointfor the labyrinthine Spanish Quarters.

For many years, the Spanish Quarters was perceived as one of the most dangerous areas of Naples, a place to be avoided. Its negative reputation stems from the fact that for many years it remained a residential area detached from the urban context and its name has been associated many times with crime and the Camorra. ⁵

In the twentieth century, however, the neighborhood began to become a gateway to Naples for different social categories, including middle-class individuals, immigrants, and even the emerging upper class. With these waves of migration, the demographics of the Spanish Quarters changed and began to include people from different backgrounds. Eventually, the area changed character and became more commercially oriented, with a great interaction with the Via Toledo. ⁶

Urban Character

While the eastern and western borders of the Spanish Quarter are clearly defined by Castel Sant'Elmo and Via Toledo, the northern and southern borders are rather vague. The Vomero district, which includes Castel Sant'Elmo, is a spacious, less densely populated area located on a slope. Especially the castle and its garden create the impression of a large urban neighborhood. With the walls of the castle and the Vittorio Emanuele highway running between the castle and the Spanish Quarter, this western side of the Spanish Quarter is physically and perceptually less permeable. As the visitors move up the slope in the Spanish Quarter, block widths increase, and physical permeability decreases with fewer access points from the highway.

On Via Toledo, the blocks are highly permeable compared to the massive blocks across the street. Almost every street in the Spanish Quarter's grid plan extends onto Via Toledo. Most of the movement in and out of the neighborhood is done through this main street. In the area stretching from Via Toledo towards the harbor, the street scale and plan become more spacious, the blocks and streets wider. One street across, and a completely different face of the city emerges. Although the façade aesthetics of the blocks are not different from the blocks on Via Toledo, there is a more spacious urban impression with the widening streets. There are tangible and intangible dimensions in the city that define the distinction between different urban textures. These dimensions are also present in the Spanish Quarter. Although there is no hierarchy in terms of street width, there are several areas as landmarks in the Spanish Quarter and they determine the density dynamics of the streets. Although the perception of the neighborhood in the higher areas of the Spanish Quarter as an urban character seems like an abstract boundary, the stair connections that develop with the increase in slope give the impression of a physically different texture. In this area, urban dynamism decreases, and uniformity increases.

Section from Via Toledo to Caster Sant’Elmo

Program/Uses

In the Spanish Quarter, due to the narrow streets, the ground floors are the areas where communication happens mostly on a human scale, while higher floors may require a wider perspective for visual communication. The Spanish Quarter is a mix of residential, commercial and cultural areas. While the ground floors on Via Toledo are inviting and have a wide variety of commercial functions, as you approach the center of the Spanish Quarter, functions are clustered around certain landmarks and as you go higher up, they begin to be used as residential. In light of all this, the line between private and public space on the ground floors is quite blurred. On the same street, there are vespas buzzing, people stopping to chat, people looking outside of their windows and offering coffee to strangers, old people sitting outside their houses and pointing tourists in the right direction, restaurants spilling out onto the streets and drawing crowds, mixed-use squares that simultaneously contain the life of locals and serve tourists.

Taking a closer look at the residential function of the ground floors, which are a big part of street life, there are bassi, an important part of the city image and urban fabric. ''Bassi'' typically refers to ground floor units or apartments located at street level. Connected to the street by a single opening, these low-ceilinged ground-floor living units sometimes have only a single opening street, serving all the basic functions of entry and exit, letting in light and air. In some, the opening increases to two, and as you enter the more residential area, you can see bassi with ground terraces. ⁷

The term "bassi" is derived from the Italian word "basso" meaning "low". These ground floor units were historically used by low-income residents, but today they are becoming an attractive living unit for some individuals, due to their seamless communication with the street. ⁶ The change in the character of the Spanish Quarter is also due to the people who come to experience these living units. The new tourist user profile does not seem to blend in with the existing residents yet. Streets are partially still resisting to change and continuing their daily order as usual. While on the other streets gentrification wave is rising, it is a developing concern in terms of area’s identity. Initial attraction to area has been the life style and spontaneous order of the ground floors. With the changing dynamics future of the area is blurry. It may cause a decline in the attraction since it is not authentic anymore or the situation can evolve in a different but efficient way for the ground floor uses.

Another characteristic that bassi add to the streets, because of their lack of space, is some private elements such as clothes drying racks and some individual seating units, which we can call urban furniture. This furniture almost eliminates the line between private and public, making the life of those living in the bassi quite observable for anyone passing by.

Public Spaces

The high density of the Spanish Quarter is also translated in the lack of open space. With so many small blocks built up, what is left of public space is narrow streets and a few public spaces. The streets, however, often serve the flow as well, with many businesses serving different purposes spilling out onto the streets, in addition to the intense flow of people and vehicles. A few public spaces are Maradona Mural area, Piazza Barrache, the square above the Toledo Metro station, and the small mixed-function spaces on Salita Trinita degli Spagnoli and Vico Lungo Trinita degli Spagnoli streets. The public squares in the Spanish Quarter do not have fixed uses, they are spontaneously organized and mixed in function. Piazza Baracche and the Toledo Metro Station square are the ones that can be perceived the most as public squares due to their size and the crowds they attract, and both are used at different times of the day.

The only public space with a defined function is the Maradona Mural area. Diego Maradona is a pivotal figure in the history of Neapolitan football club due to his extraordinary contributions on the field, leading the team to its first-ever Serie A titles in 1987 and 1990. His impact extended beyond sports, fostering a sense of pride and identity among the people of Naples, and cementing his legacy as a cultural icon in the city. You can see the Maradona representations on almost every street, a strong part of the local culture that defines the urban character of the Spanish Quarter and even Naples, and which has been turned into a somewhat commercialized element. However, the square where the Maradona Mural is located is visited with great intensity and the streets with direct access to this mural determine the density of the crowd. Apart from this, murals are an element of local culture along the streets of the Spanish Quarter.

Another tangible trace of culture on the streets is the concave or convex street altars integrated into the walls of buildings. These altars, also called urban shrines, are part of the religious culture and are votive shrines to commemorate the saints that the locals respect and find sacred. The starting point of this culture was to create street shrines illuminated by gas lamps to make the streets safer at night, thus creating places of worship on the streets and preventing petty theft. ⁸

In urban areas, it is common to find public spaces designed as large squares, which are building-free zones where cars are prohibited. However, the Spanish Quarters (Quartieri Spagnoli) in Naples do not incorporate this type of public space. Instead, the area features its own unique form of public spaces, distinct from the conventional urban planning model. Unlike the common typology, the streets of the Spanish Quarter are the public space itself. While providing the function of transpassing, most of the streets are in use for the public to interact. The area’s specific attraction element comes from this vague situation itself. It is hard to tell where the public space ends and the private space starts. Limitations of the outside boundaries are intuitive rather than physical. There is nothing stopping a tourist to sit down at the narrow street stairs while the window next to it is fully open, screening a family dinner of six. Conversations and the sounds are blending into one another.

Urban Particularity

Throughout the years, the image of the area has constantly changed. Partially it has been achieved by several organizations working on the Quarter, rest is caused by the social shift within the user profile. After pedestrianization of the Via Toledo, each of the street entrances serves a function of show-case to the neighborhood. Main tourist traffic is welcomed from here and continues to spread across the grid. Some of the entrances have denser visitor traffic than others based on the functions it contains. The area hosts approximately 10,000 tourists daily, depending on the season. ⁹ Because now the tourists have become one of the ‘user’ profiles of the area, there is an unavoidable interaction between locals and visitors.

Unlike conventional public spaces, what makes Spanish Quarter recognizable is that it holds several ground floor functions, almost as if the public spaces merge into the private spaces. While the dominant use is the residential one, it would not be surprising to find a pizza place right next to it with a very big and often noisy crowd. Although this gives the area a unique dynamic, it causes strange interactions in terms of function. What makes the area interesting in the visitors' eyes is witnessing the daily life of the place, for example by observing the bassi. Since it is an opportunity for the locals to create income from this tourist flow, it increases service-based businesses in the area. This leads to changes of the ground floor use from residential to commercial, defeating the initial attraction in the first place. For now, this transaction between functions seems to be balanced but it is a developing practice for the area. For this reason, it is hard to overlook the touristification in the area as a potential future urban issue. According to Airbnb, 99.6% of the approximately 755 units in the neighborhood are listed for short-term rentals. ¹⁰ This is a threatening rate for the long-term scenario of the Quarter. The number of local residents is decreasing, which might transform the area’s identity. With gentrification and touristification, urban character is experiencing an on-going change. If these touristic elements settle homogeneously within the existing assets, there is a chance that they will benefit the area. The current situation has developed from bottom to up, and resisted the top-down approaches that added an authentic depth to the image. Another scenario, however, holds a darker future for the Spanish Quarter, there is a possibility of the failed integration of the new and old. This can be a potential end for the existing assets, creation of something new detached from the identity that the Spanish Quarter holds so far.

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Autor*innen

Ismar Mebrure Ezgi (RWTH Aachen University, Faculty of Architecture, Sommersemester 2023)
Raveena Gadkar (RWTH Aachen University, Faculty of Architecture, Sommersemester 2023)
Selcen Fidan (RWTH Aachen University, Faculty of Architecture, Sommersemester 2023)

Quellen

Naples

Quarteri Spagnoli

A Case of Touristification: What Does the Future Hold for the Spanish Quarters?

Introduction

History

Urban Character

Program/Uses

Public Spaces

Urban Particularity

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