Italian Housing Fragilities: a Synthetic Atlas

In the last decade housing fragilities and affordability problems have increased in Italian cities as well as in other Western urban areas. The risk of a sudden housing loss affects an increasing variety of populations. This is mainly attributed to the economic conjunctures generated after the recent crisis, which have strengthened job insecurity, enhanced the gap between salaries and rental costs, limited resources for specific support-policies, reduced or postponed the maintenance or the transformation of the existing – often deteriorated – housing stock. Although countless projects, practices and policies – concluded, initiated or in progress – have faced these problems, much remains to be done at local, national and Community level, seeking for long-term strategies to fulfill the needs expressed by disadvantaged sections of the population and achieve housing stability. These issues have been explored by a multi-disciplinary group of colleagues at the Politecnico di Milano Department of Architecture and Urban Studies, trough teaching experiences, research activities and doctoral thesis. A related research line is currently under study within a wider departmental project on Italian “territorial fragilities” (2018-2022). The dimension of housing fragilities requires a combination of architectural, social and political solutions. The purpose of the research is to identify innovative architectural and governance solutions in terms of: 1) housing typologies, developed in coherence with current habits and future needs of the inhabitants; 2) innovative policies to improve public and private investment, in a period of lack of resources; 3) regeneration and rethinking of the existent housing stock, obsolescent and inadequate.