Houses Beyond-the-Threshold. A new paradigm of housing for the third Millennium

The paper presents an innovative approach to providing housing for transitory populations, starting from a recent experience carried out in Milan, Italy, with the aim of creating liveable places for immigrants temporarily inhabiting the city. 'Houses beyond-the-threshold' concerns abandoned public housing in a peripheral area of Milan, that have been transformed into living spaces for unaccompanied foreign minors, guided along a path of self-construction of the apartment they would have lived until becoming of age. Within a complex program of welcoming and job integration planned by the Association Architettura delle Convivenze, in collaboration with an artist-scientist, the project introduces a welcoming based on the idea of reciprocity, within a cultural operation that combines architectural space with site-specific artistic works created for each of the apartments. Beyond the threshold of inhabiting as an answer to the need of a shelter, an unprecedented model of encounter between art, architecture, urban and social disciplines is outlined. By triggering new forms of relationship between migrants and inhabited space, the project suggests to urban planning a working perspective to deal with the issue of temporariness, which increasingly characterizes the contemporary city. Furthermore, representing an example of renovation of the degraded building heritage by a foreign presence – the newest of the populations arriving on the urban scene, the most fragile – with an active role in space restoration, it shows the contribute that migrants could bring in processes of urban regeneration. Finally, the project proposes a model of welcoming, an ethical model questioning itself about how to build a culture of hospitality as a condition of mutual enrichment. According to these perspectives, the houses so far renovated, restored from a previous “under-threshold” condition, represent the catalyst of an urban regeneration process that is at the same time the outcome and the terrain of an effective citizenship construction.