Politecnico di Milano, Milan, Italy
2013-2014
5 meetings to compare projects and propose new housing models for Milan (with a detour in Europe)
Social housing has became very important, in Italy, in the last years and above all in Milan, where the municipality is becoming aware of the strong difficulties of the inhabitants in buying or renting a house in the city.
During the last 10-15 years in Milan, indeed, the general focus of the urban policies was towards high level houses, for a rich bourgeois, which buys houses as a sort of investment.
Medium class persons had to escape from the center of the city, searching for more affordable rents, more green, more suitable living surfaces. In doing so, they created an infinite zone of non-urban around Milan, producing an incredible amount of vehicular traffic and pollution.
The social housing, so, became a form of resistance to this sprawl, and to the economic crisis which lead the construction sector to collapse in the last years.
In this sense, we believe that, in the Social Housing, it is still possible to explore different architectural solutions for improve the people’s way of living, and this research can bring to a new quality and richness of the living spaces and a new idea of urbanity.
This quality and richness, then, are also given thanks to the different kinds of actors involved: the Social Housing can be planned in Europe by public actors, by private investors, by cooperative associations, or by single persons that want to join together and construct their home (like Cohousing experiences).
We decided to investigate these different forms of the Social Housing, deepening one point of view for each conference:
1. Private Actors – Cooperative Associations
2. Private Actors – Foundations and No profit companies
3. Public Actors – The city of Milan
4. European Actors – Private / Public
5. The future of the housing in Milan: a debate with decision makers
In each conference high quality built projects will be presented, they will show how is possible to solve the issue of the Social Housing in terms of urban and architectural solutions. We will deepen the processes, the role of the architect and the architectural decisions taken.