Casoria

Casoria is the fifth largest municipality in the metropolitan city of Naples and the largest municipality in the northern Naples area. Casoria has a population of 77 968 (November 2014) and has noted a decreasing trend since its maximum number of inhabitants of 83 576 in 1998. Naples Metropolitan City has over 3.2 million inhabitants, who all live within the 92 municipalities that are all linked to one another.

Until the end of the 1970s, Casoria was a major industrial centre, hosting important steel and chemical industries. When production activities stopped, factories and industrial sites were abandoned and Casoria developed a strong services sector. Today, the services sector also finds itself in a crisis. Local residents are leaving the area due to traffic congestion, unemployment, low quality settlements, poor quality housing, inadequate infrastructures (roads, facilities) and lack of public green space.

Casoria completed its process of population growth. Nonetheless, there is a need for more housing in the near future because of the current multiplication of households and, above all, a more general transformation of the most recent parts of the 20th-century city. Casoria includes a high number of underused areas and buildings from the industrial and services sectors. Part of the residential buildings dating back to the first post-war expansion are underused or non-compliant with current seismic design and environmental standards. The remaining open spaces, mostly situated around infrastructures (highway, railway, airport), are generally abandoned. The city wants to improve matters by turning some of these areas into large suburban public parks, by improving the quality of the areas from the 1960s and 1970s, and by transforming strategically located brownfield sites.