Fatih is one of Istanbul’s oldest and most densely inhabited districts, and one of its most seismically vulnerable. But vulnerability here is not a single condition. It is a palimpsest: layered across centuries of Byzantine, Ottoman, and Republican settlement, waves of migration, and accelerating gentrification, each leaving behind a different structural and social residue. This research mapped that complexity through the correlation of physical indicators ; building age, density, height, structural typology with seismic risk data and the social profiles of individual neighbourhoods. What emerged was an uneven geography of risk in which physical fragility and social precarity frequently overlap, concentrating exposure among the district’s most economically marginalised communities. The risk is real. But in Istanbul, the instrument designed to address it, kentsel dönüşüm (urban transformation) has been increasingly captured by real estate interests, accelerating the displacement of the very residents it purports to protect. The research does not argue against intervention. It argues that when a city finally looks at its most vulnerable communities, the question of how it looks and for whom it acts is as urgent as the risk itself. The methodology proposed here; correlating physical and social vulnerability across historic, palimpsest cities, is an attempt to make that question harder to avoid.

Southeast Rome. A fragment of the city bordered by historic parks, existing residential towers, and an unused green space that the surrounding community has never been able to claim. The neighbourhood has housing. What it lacks is presence — a place where collective life can happen, where the city becomes legible to the people who live in it. The proposal reads the existing urban context before proposing anything new. The height and alignment of Torre del Fiscale and the residential towers of Muratori and De Renzi establish the formal references for a civic tower: a library, a café, a public data center— functions that do not serve a single user but accumulate meaning through repeated, shared use. The green space is not filled but activated, organised around the building as a threshold between the neighbourhood and the city beyond. The tower does not invent a new identity for this place. It makes visible the one that was already waiting to be inhabited.

The Pontieri site in the historic centre of Piacenza has been present and absent simultaneously; a military base enclosed within the city’s Roman walls, physically there but functionally invisible to the community around it. For years its interior remained unknown to the citizens whose daily life circulated at its edges. The project begins by asking what the city lost during that closure, and what it most urgently needs now that the site is available. The answer, in Piacenza’s densely built historic centre, is straightforward: green space, affordable housing, and a civic life that the old city fabric can no longer absorb on its own. The proposal divides the site into three interlocking functions: cultural, residential, and commercial. Organised around a central park that becomes the site’s new public identity. Mixed housing for students and families sits above ground-floor commercial uses, keeping the streets active across seasons. Passive house principles such as solar angle calculations, photovoltaic facades, shutters and insulation make the building’s energy logic visible rather than concealed, turning sustainability from a technical afterthought into an architectural statement. The site was closed. The proposal opens it — not just physically, but programmatically, ecologically, and socially — returning to the city what had been quietly withheld from it.

Since 1334, Torre Minerva has stood on the Sorrento Peninsula, built against piracy, shaped by the sea, and forgotten by time. Tasked with transforming this historic watchtower into an artist residency, the design asks a fundamental question: how do you inhabit a fortified wall without violating it? The answer lies within the wall itself. Drawing on Louis Kahn’s concept of walls as rooms, the proposal uncovers spaces already hidden within the stone, scaling each recess to a function: the tower’s historic core becomes the site of living and making, while an accessible restructuring of the lighthouse opens the upper level to a new horizon. Two new spaces extend this logic beyond the existing walls. The Pavilion is a light threshold structure before the tower, its open modular frame and heavy sliding slatted screens mediating between the public and the act of making, close enough to witness, never made to feel like an intrusion. The Cliff Studio descends below, cut into the rock for solitude: a lightweight, semi-transparent roof admits a constant daylight, holding the artist between the weight of the cliff and the openness of the horizon. The tower was built to watch for threats from the sea. This proposal asks it to watch over what is made within its walls instead.

Developed as a collaborative cartographic investigation, this project re-evaluates the Adriatic linear metropolis—traditionally viewed as a continuous, homogenous holiday coast. By shifting the lens away from seasonal tourism, this psychogeographic map exposes an “archipelago” of isolated socio-political pockets, infrastructure nodes, and marginalized communities that share conditions of spatial and social exclusion. Tracking critical landscape thresholds along the A14 motorway, the SS16 state highway, and river deltas, the fieldwork maps the friction between transient holiday enclaves and permanent vulnerable realities—such as the iconic Hotel House and Lido Tre Archi. Through an analogue, investigative zine format, the research documents informal beach economies, spatial segregation, and the aggressive monetization of public land.