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.

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

N. Pezzoni
2019-01-01

Abstract

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.
2019
"Planning for transition" Book of Papers
978-88-99243-93-7
Housing; Urban regeneration; Migrants; Transitory Living
File in questo prodotto:
File Dimensione Formato  
AESOP Houses beyond the threshold.pdf

Accesso riservato

: Publisher’s version
Dimensione 972.04 kB
Formato Adobe PDF
972.04 kB Adobe PDF   Visualizza/Apri

I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.

Utilizza questo identificativo per citare o creare un link a questo documento: https://hdl.handle.net/11311/1118515
Citazioni
  • ???jsp.display-item.citation.pmc??? ND
  • Scopus ND
  • ???jsp.display-item.citation.isi??? ND
social impact