“Archillà is the new Reggio”. Thus assured the Reggina policy in the aftermath of the transversal majority vote of the City Council to indicate the plateau to the north of the city as an area to be allocated to the creation of new urban, mutualistic and popular construction settlements, today prey to degradation. Now the government and Parliament have included the neighborhood in the urban regeneration project financed with the fund for development and cohesion 2021-2027.
In the early 1980s, the city’s political debate was focused mainly on the lines of urban development in the north director of the municipal area, in pursuit of an idea of conurbation of the Strait area with Villa San Giovanni and the opposite Messina, also in the perspective of the construction of the bridge. The first constructions designed by various cooperatives are soon built, despite the penetration road towards Arghillà, starting from the highway 18 at the height of the town of Catona, was still the “Vallelonga” stream, a watercourse that in winter, punctually, flooded the state road 18 of debris. The first “cooperators”, authentic pioneers, took place daily, and several times, two kilometers of torrent bed, with imaginable damage to cars, to reach the state road 18 and, from the innesto of Catona, proceed to Reggio Calabria or in the direction of Villa San Giovanni.
At the end of the 1980s, the city council led by the mayor of the time, Michele Musolino, contracts the works to make the “Vallelonga” driven, thus opening the perspective to new real estate settlements and to popular construction programs. In a few years, about five thousand people moved to Arghillà, including a large Roma community cleared by the former military barracks of the 208 ‘infantry battalion to leave that city area to the construction of the Morelli hospital. Thousands of people are thus destined to live in nothing, in an agricultural area with intensive cultivation of fine vineyards – definitively compromised – without any public transport service, schools, civil and social aggregation centers, except the new parish of Sant’Aurelio.
A dormitory neighborhood “Nobody’s land”
Archillà soon becomes a dormitory neighborhood, “nobody’s land”, despite the work of the police, overwhelmed by neglect and illegality. Thanks to the desire for numerous residents who animate a neighborhood association, the Municipality of Reggio Calabria finally started a comparison table in recent years with the coordination of Argechillà associations, for the improvement of services and life in the neighborhood, to counteract the illegality and daily incursions of common and organized crime characterized by an incessant predatory action made of car and agricultural vehicles, of drug dealing, of waste recycling.
“The Ministry of the Interior – said the Minister planted – will allocate 5 million euros for the start of the urban regeneration of Archillà, also in agreement with the Calabria Region, in order to remove the degradation conditions of the neighborhood and raise the overall safety framework”. The deputy Francesco Cannizzaro (FI), for his part, expressed “satisfaction with the attention of the Meloni government for the concrete response, a first step of a path that will feature Calabria and the Archillà district. With the concrete presence of the state by our side – concludes the parliamentarian of Forza Italia – we will arrive at a positive solution for a reality that today is a social, cultural and structural powder keg ».