Conoscere e vivere le residenze per studenti. Una nuova progettazione oltre la legge.

Essential support structures for access to higher level education, university residences have become, over time and also in our country, an interesting field of study and research. Recent Law no. 338/2000 and its implementing decrees which formed the basis of the National University Residence Action Plan may have improved the overall situation but they have also highlighted some limitations of the product and process, bringing to the fore the opportunity to proceed with further development of regulatory aspects, design, realisation and management, also on the basis of interesting suggestions that may be borrowed from similar experiences abroad. To increase the number of beds available in Italian university residences, in the hope of aligning ourselves with the educational systems of excellence, it seems strategic to build alliances and synergies between the world of university research and national entrepreneurship in such a way that, moving forward towards shared objectives, universities will be transformed into a valuable source of support for private operators and real estate funds, providing this potential market with concrete answers in exchange for acceptable results in terms of economic return. For these reasons, at the ABC Department of the Polytechnic University of Milan was formed the first work group to study the unique facets of this particular sector, investigating both morpho-techno-typological aspects and those related to management, economic and organisational matters. The objective of the contribution is to analyse – taking on the systemic approach of the discipline of architectural technology - the theme of university residences by defining the different variables and the contents that should guide the process of planning, design, construction and management. Based on the findings from a survey on the production of residential facilities for universities on an international scale, the researchers also intend to formulate a number of specific observations on recent regulations passed in our country, in regard to morpho-techno-typological requisites and performance of the building and plant systems, concluding with the presentation of financial and economic models that can help define the various hypotheses of economic feasibility, in relation to the possible operators involved in the construction process.