OMA’s Roma Continua: 25-Year Vision for Rome’s Ancient Layers

Roma Continua, the winning vision by IT’S and OMA for the Roma REgeneration Foundation competition, presents a 25-year urban framework that treats Rome as an active, living system. Rather than chasing a single iconic intervention, the plan reads the city as layers of history and ecological potential.

It recalibrates growth through green infrastructure, mobility, and adaptive reuse. The goal is to connect the past to a resilient, climate-responsive landscape while preserving the city’s identity.

Roma Continua: A 25-Year Framework for a Living Rome

At its core, the proposal reframes urban expansion as a series of connected systems. By starting from the city’s existing green structure and the Tiber river basin, it creates a network that links recreation, ecological repair, agriculture, and public health.

The result is a modular framework that can evolve incrementally. This approach maintains flexibility in a city with deep historical layers.

The plan emphasizes interfaces and connections over isolated interventions. It prioritizes human-scale mobility and broad regional reach.

Rome is invited to grow through recalibration, maintaining legibility and identity. The strategy expands opportunities across the metropolitan area.

Five green corridors and multimodal mobility hubs

Five green corridors, aligned with the Tiber and its tributaries, anchor the framework and define cross-city ecological and social ambitions. Along these corridors, the proposal introduces five multimodal mobility hubs—framed as contemporary “forums of innovation”—designed to knit transit with housing, services, hospitality, and riverside amenities.

These hubs function as critical nodes for linking metropolitan and last-mile movement. They anchor public life in sustainable landscapes.

To maintain a humane scale, cycling networks radiate about five kilometers from each forum. This enables accessible, healthy travel that connects local neighborhoods with regional networks.

The corridors and hubs form a living lattice that supports daily life and long-range connectivity.

Reuse-led urbanism and climate-responsive landscapes

The Roma Continua plan shifts attention away from the congested historic core toward expanded routes, thresholds, and direct rail links. These connections reach places such as Ostia, Frascati, Tivoli, and Veio.

This strategy treats reuse as a core urban practice. Around the five forums, five knowledge clusters would concentrate industries such as pharmaceuticals, high-tech, aerospace, energy, mobility, finance, and agriculture.

These clusters create a climate-responsive landscape that integrates universities, startups, and established companies.

• Adaptive reuse of vacant buildings and development plots to activate underutilized sites.
• Targeted new construction that fits a climate-responsive, low-energy regime.
• Public amenities and mobility linkages that bind fragmented sites into a coherent citywide system.
• Direct rail connections and expanded thresholds that connect peripheral districts with the historic core.
• A design language that preserves identity while enabling evolution through incremental change.

Economies of knowledge and a climate-conscious landscape

By situating five knowledge clusters around the five forums, Roma Continua envisions a symbiotic ecosystem where universities, startups, and established firms collaborate within a living urban metabolism. The plan elevates industries aligned with Rome’s future growth—pharma, advanced technologies, aerospace, energy, mobility, finance, and agriculture—while embedding them in a landscape that responds to climate realities and public health needs.

Regional reach and the redefinition of the historic core

Beyond revitalizing the periphery, the proposal redefines thresholds and routes that extend Rome’s influence outward. By expanding paths toward the coast and hinterland, and by strengthening direct rail connections, the city can rebalance tourism, commerce, and daily life.

The strategy prioritizes interfaces and systems over spectacular interventions. It recognizes that Rome’s strength lies in its ability to adapt while preserving the essential character that locals and visitors value.

 
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