Re-Inhabiting. Thoughts on the Contribution of Interior Architecture to Adaptive Intervention: People, Places, and Identities.

It is widely believed that working on the built environment is increasingly becoming a predominant condition of the contemporary architectural practice. As many authors point out, this can be related both to the decreased capacity of urban territories to accommodate new buildings in a full urban fabric as well as to a new approach toward an environmental, economic, and socially sustainable development. Assuming, with Attiwill, “the concept of interior” “as a question and problematic within contemporary culture” (2009, p. 2), I will argue here that the centrality of adaptive reuse for contemporary architectural theory and practice can also be associated with the shifting social and cultural conditions of modern European cities. By proposing an idea of reuse as re-inhabiting, I investigate the entailments of adaptive interventions toward identity and memory work within a consolidated urban context increasingly characterized by quick profound changes in the composition of its population and built environment under the impact of intense migration flows, augmented mobility of people, and the global economy.