Le case per tutti: da strategia di uguaglianza sociale a occasione di recupero riadattivo e flessibile

The reconstruction of the real estate assets after the Second World War required rapid comple- tion times and low costs, to meet the different and more difficult social conditions compared to the years before the war. This is how the concept of “home for all” was born. The idea was to create large buildings with a large number of apartments, standardized, but in connection with common areas to allow socializing within the community present in the same building. In Italy, the greatest number of social housing neighborhoods was created between the fifties and sixties, in relation to the great (post-war) economic boom that involved our country and which led to a high migration of people from the countryside moved to urban centers. The great design and construction machine set in motion in those years started from the assump- tion that “the home is a living organism; walls and furniture, even if built at different times or for different initiatives, must be designed at the same time, as elements of an inseparable unit.” These intentions to create a “home for all”, well integrated into the urban and social context, in most cases, have been disregarded. The causes of the failure were mainly (i) the excessive size of the buildings and (ii) the real lack of services offered to the inhabitants. Thus, the excessive density of these settlements needs to be rethought today, as it is necessary to bring the building back to a human scale. Furthermore, the design developments born from the noble idea of the house for all have encountered a great crisis due to the association of the concept of the social house with a low-value and totally impersonal artefact, as well as a sense of great rigidity, which does not allow a real adaptation of the entire building to the changing needs of today’s society. Therefore, “indefinite and monotonous repetitions of the same type of dwelling were created, among which “real man” could not even distinguish his own dwelling”. A further problem was the failure to actually realize one of the basic ideas of social housing, i.e. the implementation of perfect integration between private spaces and spaces of common use. These common spaces should have been suitable places to encourage socialization between condominiums and in which an intense sharing activity could take shape that could improve the psychological comfort of the inhabitants. As a consequence, “homes for all” have often generated a series of problems, transforming, in some cases, a noble idea into its Achilles’ heel: empty spa- ces, never filled and never put at the service of the community, spaces that have acted as driving not only physical but also social degradation of buildings. An idea of well-being for all, of com- munity and sharing that has transformed into its exact opposite, giving shape, in some cases, to places of social marginalization, i.e. ghettos without services. Nonetheless, today it is necessary to conserve and reuse the built heritage of homes for all. We must now plan and implement the process of conservation, change, recovery and reuse of the Italian public residential heritage. This intervention is necessary for at least three reasons: (i) maintaining accommodation dedicated to the weakest sections of the population; (ii) still leave the historical memory of a relevant phase of architectural thought and urban structure that cha- racterized the post-war reconstruction phase of our country; (iii) obtain the result of extending the life of the structures by applying flexibility and adaptability methodologies, especially throu- gh the use of modular prefabricated buildings made with renewable materials and dry assembled. These reasons, both social and historical, require a large investment, first of all in ideas, people and in any case also economic, aimed at the redevelopment, the best possible, and the reuse -as dignified and integrated as possible- of this part of our real estate assets, starting from a sharing that can involve the end user right from the early stages of conception and redesign.