For a Housing still “Social”: the Fluent Governance

One of the theoretical models widely used in investigations on social housing is network governance, that is anyway not free from critiques related to inequalities of power and the destabilizing role of uncertainty and increase of complexity, in an intermediate form between market and hierarchy, being with a uni-directionality of bottom-up processes, when oriented to public deliberation, or top-down when decision-makers are the political level, technical experts. Given the new complexity of the social housing issue, and considered the limits of the network governance this work aims at looking for a possible different theoretical framework about governance, able to give different tools in order to simplify the decision making processes but without any alteration of any basic decisional element. The contribute given by this work is the proposition of what has been called “fluent governance” as a framework of decision making able to represent the whole spectrum of interventions in the decision making process, taking into account also those aspects that are not captured by standard models as the network governance. The paper reports about a first experimentation of the proposed model and consequent tools conducted in Italy in the field of renovating social housing policy. A structural analysis has been conducted using Micmac method for the identification of key variables useful for detecting the forecast of possible different scenarios in developing social housing policies in Italy.