Image, transformation and memory option of a ‘motor town’

The emergence of new architectural types – factories, garages, showrooms, service stations – and infrastructures – tunnels, flyovers, motorway junctions – characterized the change in mobility landscape from Western cities to global automobile model. The shift is evident in productive “motor towns”, as Detroit, Coventry, Stuttgart, Wolfsburg, Gothenburg and Turin. Turin’s industrial image and architectural profile gradually shaped different areas of the city for over 120 years. The automotive industry still has visible traces in urban image – factories, representative buildings, archaeological remains in post-industrial parks – that can reconstruct collective memory and identity while promoting industrial tourism, supporting a renewed interpretation of the city, rethinking post-industrial sites while addressing contemporary social needs. Isolated vestiges – chimneys, remnants of factories, vertical-to-horizontal models, large production sectors – coexist with partially active sites, as Mirafiori in Turin or Torsland in Gothenburg, which fostered “company towns” and real estate growth with sports, social services, residences. Testimonial elements – façades, decorative, structural parts – are often preserved, through Urban Development Plan or by the Superintendency of Archaeology, Fine Arts and Landscape in Italy, such as government heritage preservation agencies in other countries. Overall, the approach to preserve industrial heritage gained recognition only after the 1980s, following extensive industrial decline and loss of potential industrial monuments. This cultural and social process was reflected in the initial appreciation of tangible and intangible dimensions of industrial material culture, as in reinterpretation of abandoned industrial sites. Turin’s excursus begins with the 1984 research commissioned by the Municipality to the Polytechnic University and studies for the 1995 Municipal Master Plan, that introduced criteria for economic, architectural, feasibility evaluation. The aim is to assess, after forty years, the effects of these directives on conservation and transformation of industrial heritage, in relation to urban planning and marketing. Large historic vertical factories emerge in town as landmarks and industrial monuments, as Lingotto, Microtecnica, OGR, Lancia Carrozzerie, with different outcomes in terms of gentrification, post-industrial speculation, multifunctional regeneration, enhancement of creative, research and innovation districts.