Rebuilding the Edge

Rebuilding the Edge was the first iteration of Liminal Lab, the result of a collaboration between Liminal, Fondazione FS Italiane, MIT-Italy, the MIT Urban Risk Lab and the MIT Digital Structures Research Group. From 9 to 24 June 2022, 18 MIT students joined members of Liminal on the ground to develop strategic visions for the territories along the Ferrovia dei Parchi: the Sulmona–Carpinone railway between Abruzzo and Molise, rehabilitated by Fondazione FS in the last decade for historic tourist trains. The group lived in Pettorano sul Gizio and worked from the station at Roccaraso, which Fondazione FS renovated for the workshop and Liminal turned into a pop-up co-working space.

Before the workshop, stations and key buildings along the line were documented with GIS mapping and photogrammetry. On site, the work ran over three weeks. In the first, the group visited the Fondazione FS archive in Rome, rode the historic train from Sulmona to Carovilli, toured MAXXI L’Aquila and met the mayor of Pettorano sul Gizio. In the second, it met councillors and mayors of Sulmona and Castel di Sangro, the Consorzio Aglio Rosso, CAI, the local GAL, the Majella National Park and the SAI migrant-reception programme, and split into six teams by theme, site and scale. In the third, the teams developed their proposals through studio reviews with the MIT faculty and presented them at Roccaraso station on 24 June to a jury of professionals and local stakeholders.

Each team documented, analysed and proposed, and left a booklet:

1. Trails as a Generative System — Bugnara, Introdacqua, Sulmona, Pettorano sul Gizio and Cansano.
2. Resilience for Small-Scale Farming — the Conca di Sulmona, in the Valle Peligna.
3. The Last Mile: From Station to Town — nine stations of the line, and Cansano.
4. Occupancy & Maintenance Survey — Pettorano sul Gizio.
5. Reconfiguring a Regional Portal — Castel di Sangro.
6. A Space for Migrants in Towns — the SAI programme in Castel del Giudice.

The work was gathered in a pilot report with the six booklets, in English and Italian, and shown in an exhibition at the MIT Department of Architecture. Booklets 01 and 02 yielded the Sentiero Juan Carrito, a loop of about 50 km linking Sulmona with Bugnara, Introdacqua, Pettorano sul Gizio and Cansano, whose implementation the report describes as being structured with the Municipality of Sulmona. The occupancy survey of Pettorano sul Gizio, which recorded the visible signs of occupation and abandonment of every building with a phone-based form, began the building mapping method that Liminal later refined in Monti Prenestini and applied in Encouraging Reuse.