Gibellina: Vanguard of a Cosmopolitan City

Abstract

Gibellina is a city formed by orogenesis. It was reborn after a dramatic earthquake and shook the sediment off urban theory, becoming a city open to the world and to the worlds of contemporary culture; of architecture, art, theatre. To understand its revolutionary force, we must immerse ourselves in the context of 1968, when an earthquake hit the Belice Valley with a violence capable of damaging fourteen cities and razing four of them—including Gibellina— to the ground. The earthquake marked a sharp break in the historical continuity of the small, rural centre of Sicily. The original site of the town was abandoned and another city was built from scratch for the surviving inhabitants. The city was “other”, alien to the sociocultural and environmental context; a dystopian transplant of an urban utopia. The reconstruction process was managed entirely by the Italian state, without any dialogue with the inhabitants. While the futuristic plan for Gibellina won much acclaim for its technical perfection, it nevertheless produced an urban landscape that was alienating, fragmented into terraced houses, and dispersed across vast empty spaces, oversized streets, and useless public services.