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 High-tech hopes amid the rubble of L'Aquila

A couple walks on Monday near the "red zone", which is closed to the public, in the historic area of L'Aquila, Italy. The region was devastated three years ago by an earthquake. [Andreas Solaro / AFP]

 

 

 

Three years after a quake devastated L'Aquila, the Italian town has launched a bid to become a high-tech European city - to the skepticism of thousands of people still living in temporary housing.

Large parts of the center remain boarded up, even as local architects work with the council on a "Smart City" project to rebuild, using cutting-edge techniques that has the backing of Prime Minister Mario Monti's government.

"The idea is to turn the tragedy of the earthquake into an opportunity to rebuild in an intelligent, innovative way while preserving the city's heritage," Alfredo Moroni, the town councillor overseeing the project, said.

It is an ambitious aim in a town still traumatized as it marks the third anniversary of the April 6, 2009, tragedy that claimed 308 lives.

Shoes and broken ornaments still lie in the dust in abandoned homes and few people venture through the empty streets or into the sunlit main square, where an elderly priest stands solitary guard over a collapsed medieval church.

"L'Aquila is just like Pompeii, a ghost town visited by people who come just to see the ruins," said pensioner Giuliano Guetti, referring to the part-buried Roman town near Naples that was destroyed by a volcanic eruption in AD 79.

"We feel isolated, totally cut off from the world. There's nothing here, nowhere to socialize ... before any 'Smart' plan we need basic services, like a local shop or bar, to make us feel like normal citizens," said Guetti, 78.

In a protest against the lack of reconstruction, members of a local cultural association are collecting thousands of colorful crochet samples sent in by supporters, which they will then knit into banners to go up around the city.

The "Urban Knitting" initiative is "an attempt to bring back color to our historic center, a reaction against the gray and the emptiness which we can no longer tolerate," the Animammersa association said in a statement.

A highly critical report by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development last month condemned "a culture of inaction" and called for a radical overhaul of social services and the local economy.

The "Smart City" project includes plans for a pedestrianized city-center with bike-sharing schemes, buildings fitted with solar panels and a facility to allow local inhabitants to consult their doctor via video link.

But with 170 hectares of the center standing empty, dotted with makeshift shrines to the victims of the earthquake, there is widespread disbelief among locals that a plan to modernize L'Aquila will ever be enacted.

'We have to hope'

"The government implemented emergency measures after the quake and got everyone into housing - in new builds, hotels or barracks - but after that we were abandoned and there's been a serious social breakdown," Moroni said.

Critics accused the then premier Silvio Berlusconi of incompetence and his civil protection agency of trying to exploit the earthquake for financial gain.

Nearly a quarter of L'Aquila's pre-earthquake population of 75,000 is still living in wooden houses, hotels, army barracks and new builds in remote areas with no public services. Thousands more have moved away altogether.

Only four families have moved back into the city center, officials said.

As stray dogs wander through the maze of alleyways and abandoned buildings with gaping holes in their sides, architect Marco Morante explains their plan.

"Just after the earthquake we formed a group called Collettivo 99 and argued that the city could be restored and transformed using renewable energy sources, anti-earthquake systems, the Internet," said Morante, the group's head.

"We wanted to create the West's first technologically 'smart' medieval city, but no one listened. We now need to move fast or we risk no one wanting to return in years to come to a city they no longer feel is their own," he said.

"With Monti's government, we finally have the chance to be heard," he added.

In Bazzano, a suburb of L'Aquila hit hard by the quake, residents living in temporary housing a stone's throw from their rubble-strewn houses welcome the plan, but warn of growing social unease and a lack of trust in the authorities.

Other inhabitants say the plan is their only hope. "We can't know whether the plan will work, but we have to hope," said Giovanni Benevieri. "Without hope we are left with nothing but a dead city."

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