Eco-friendly Student Housing as a way towards buldings refurbishment and Urban Renewal

All over the world, student housing is still an important way of living together. This housing solution is among the few which are able to involve more complex ways of common living, such as, for example, co-housing and co-working. As a matter of fact, university residences can promote new lifestyles and identity values which, especially in Europe, can determine new connections between the old city and the suburbs, with positive effects in terms of regeneration, integration and revitalization. To such purpose student housing stimulates the investigation of issues such as the identity and cohesion of social housing, together with the search for shared life forms and new paradigms for contemporary living. For all these reasons, it appears to be an extremely useful tool to educate new generations to the issues of environmental sustainability. Besides being an indispensable support for instructional programs, university residences constitute an interesting reference for all the academic community, because of their crucial role in the development of the relationships between the individual and the group. University residences are therefore an actual form of elective neighborhood, where private spaces and collective services coexist in a balance aimed at granting users the maximum privacy in the residential area, together with the possibility to share rooms and common spaces, according to the principles of economic and environmental sustainability. To this extent, university residences also play a key role in the process of rehabilitation and improvement of the urban environments characterized by social, physical and economic segregation. This objective is achievable through the recovery of the “discontinued urban containers“: barracks, hospitals, office building, etc. University housing can consolidate and intensify urbanity: it allows the construction of new urban activities (recreational, entrepreneurial, cultural, social, etc.), as well as the “healing“ of the urban fabric wounds, being one of the tools with which – as maintained by architect Renzo Piano – it is possible to “fertilize“ the degraded city. This paper – which is part of an ongoing research on the topic of student housing – investigates the most innovative practices and building design strategies, involving building refurbishment and urban renewal as processes involving the rehabilitation and the improvement of a urban neighborhood or area, and how this “urban renewal” can be part of the gentrification process, which is typically the result of an increased interest in a specific environment. Such renewal may include the demolition of old or run-down buildings, the construction and renovation of new ones, or the addition of features to urban facilities.