Interior design and social science. An applied research on the places caring and hosting asylum seekers and refugees in the city of Milan.

The capacity to help and support the most vulnerable sectors of population is a critical point for the contemporary urban societies, in a context marked by a sharp contrast between the lack of resources and the need to maintain an adequate level of welfare. One of the most problematic areas is about caring and protecting the asylum seekers and the refugees, who experiment a condition of existential displacement or dislocation (Papadopoulos, 2002) compounded by economic and psychological problems. The Italian policy about the asylum seekers has often failed to establish a global model, able to empower their conditions as requested by the international agreements. It was in fact largely characterized by an emergency policy, without any systemic perspective, and locations as abandoned schools and mobile homes were chosen randomly to answer the urgent requests of new solutions for a temporary accommodation of the asylum seekers. The result was a vicious circle of fragility, in which the most vulnerable people were hosted in the most unsupportive residential environments. A research project was developed by a multi-disciplinary group, in Milan, involving public actors, designers and environmental psychologist, with the aim of creating some practical guidelines to evolve these spaces. In particular, the challenge was to favour a process of empowerment, projecting some lo-fi design solutions able to transform an environment perceived as totally precarious in a place of virtuous temporariness, also supporting new forms of individual place attachment and identification (Low & Altman, 1992).