In line with architect Oswald Ungers’s vision of Berlin as an archipelago, as “cities within the city”, where the islands become spots of urban density, the brand new Archipelago of Assen becomes a contemporary manifesto of our new contemporary urban condition. The City does not evolve by itself as if it were made of unmodifiable parts, but it can regenerate its interior patterns in response to the different socio-economic conditions affecting it. Regeneration/Recycling is a very substantial and important theme in our current economic crisis and in social and environmental transformations. Urban Recycling is therefore one of the main resources which have been recently identified by some of the most important contemporary urbanists and theorists as innovative potential interventions on the city faced with the current crisis and profound transformations. Indeed they affirm that building recovery is energetically more favourable since less energy is required to renovate a building than to build a new one. Recovering and Recycling the existing buildings necessarily means finding an innovative way to improve energy performances and radically decrease the economic costs of the project. In this sense we evaluated two main concepts of intervention on existing buildings (BUILDING -IN AND BUILDING OVER) and another related to water infrastructure, which could be used in our strategic area of transformation and in all larger Archipelagos in the future too.