Giovanni Baiocchetti and research on post-earthquake L’Aquila at the University of Milan

From L’Aquila to Milan, always carrying with him the legacy of his city. Today Giovanni Baiocchetti, sixteen years old at the time of the earthquake, is a doctoral student at the University of Milan and is carrying out a research project on the changes in L’Aquila after the earthquake.
“It’s time to design the city of the future”. The interview in the new appointment “Wide angle.”

He was part of the great family of the capital Giovanni Baiocchetti, when he was a student from L’Aquila with a passion for journalism. Since then, he has come a long way, above all he has covered many kilometres: first to reach Milan, then traveling around the world.
From the Cotugno High School to collaboration with The capital of Abruzzothen, up to a doctorate arrived after his master’s studies and a period in which he switched to the other side of the professorship, dedicating himself to teaching. “I was 16 when the earthquake struck, so my adolescence was a period in which I found myself at the center of the process of change in the city and the territory. And we, very young at the time, were part of that change. Probably, my desire to talk about the city that was changing was born precisely from that context.”

From the master’s degree in Milan and from Erasmus, the desire to travel and visit many corners of the world has accompanied him over the years, together with journalism. This too was never completely missing in his new Milanese life and passed through some articles written for various national newspapers, such as The print. Then, the beginning of a new journey. “Reasoning about my future, I understood that what I had loved doing most, over time, was the activity in which I had followed, for the capital, the change of the territory through local development, territorial policy, and the valorisation of heritage. So I started to ask myself how to continue dealing with this topic and, at the suggestion of a teacher, I started to evaluate the possibility of undertaking a doctorate in Geography, based on a research project focused on the evolution of the post-earthquake L’Aquila area. I’m still at the beginning, but through the lens of geography – and all its declinations, from the economic to the political and cultural – I try to tell how our territory has changed and how it is changing.”

Now Giovanni Baiocchetti has been in the city since the beginning of April and will remain for a whole month: he is, in fact, conducting field research, at GSSI: “I am doing interviews, gathering opinions on the data I already have available and I am listening to proposals on how we tend to imagine the future development of L’Aquila”he explains to the microphones of the capital.
The steps taken in these years of reconstruction, moreover, marked Giovanni’s years in L’Aquila after 6 April 2009. “We all went to see the reopening of a street, we all ran to see a shop reopening, or the start of work in a park. In short, all of this is a past whose wealth of knowledge I have preserved and whose legacy I continue to preserve.” A treasure that will be the basis of Giovanni’s new professional adventure, which will make his city a case study, thinking of L’Aquila to come, because “we are still in the phase where we can design the city of tomorrow“.

The interview