ADAPTIVE REUSE AND SOCIAL HOUSING: A LOCAL PLANNING INSTRUMENT

This essay defines an innovative operating tool (standard and rule) that aims to support and normalize projects of redevelopment and adaptive reuse. The strength of this new tool is the ability to activate public/private partnerships in order to bring on projects of social housing and co-housing on abandoned private buildings with the control and guide of the public administration. The proposed process has the following purposes: acting on private areas, smaller than 15.000 sqm, retrofitting abandoned industrial and tertiary buildings, improving the environmental and urban landscape quality, preserving areas covered by public standards, providing practical assessment tools, integrating social housing and co-housing, promoting functional mix, multi-functionality and flexibility, encouraging neighbour’s inclusion and active participation, fostering the awareness in environmental issues and participatory planning, supporting micro-urban regenerations.The method is based on the synergy of fundamental economic, social and environmental factors (recognizable internationally as the four dimensions of sustainability) in order to reach an unedited breakthrough in the institutional dimension. The tool allows the involved stakeholders to draft a meta-project in compliance with the adopted procedure previsions. The meta-project assessment has to be done on the base of different perspectives: economic (life cycle cost, global cost); social (Social Return on investment); environmental impact, in accordance with specific indicators identified in response to the application. The outcome is a regulatory tool for the integration and implementation of the current Italian regulations. It is based on the principle of “anticipation of decisions" and is able to overcome the limits of the current legislation that provides for an official assessment only when the project is almost whole developed and proceeded. At the other side this tool gives great value to the meta-project phase in order to test a project’s feasibility, This tool allows to set, with a methodological and systemic approach, strategies related to the quality of living, in order to combine in a virtuous circle the involved stakeholders, considered as potential carriers of positive values. The innovative results come into a largely unexplored scenario by the traditional research.