LIVING IN TIMES OF CRISIS. A DESIGN EXPERIMENTATION BETWEEN TEACHING AND RESEARCH FOR A "MINIMUM" BUT NOT "MINOR" LIVING

Focus of the proposal is a research that has been conducted between teaching and academic research, with a strong connection with institutions from the Milan area and its hinterland. The research saw also an active participation of local actors (students, artisans, retailers) and involved the students of a course of the Politecnico di Milano - School of Design, who were called to provide innovative design proposals on a strongly contemporary topic: how to make social living in Public Housing in Milan welcoming and sustainable, even in homes characterized by minimum dimensions (below the regulatory threshold). The contribution of the students of the Politecnico di Milano found a concrete application with a pilot experimentation during the Milan Design Week. This experimentation resulted in a collective performance which was held in a Milanese public space (Piazza Cordusio); it involved the craftsmen of Confartigianato Imprese Lissone. As a "scenic act", the artisans improvised the realization of a multifunctional compact furniture (designed by the students of the Polytechnic and then installed in a typical “social house” of the Municipality of Milan); it set itself as demonstration of an economic, fast and functional prototyping, for a "minimum living" that does not necessarily have to be interpreted as a "minor living". The project proposal developed in the university was also linked to a research funded by the Lombardy Region, which had the Municipality of Lissone as leader. The experience was configured, therefore, as a virtuous example of collaboration between public and private, academia and public bodies, students and citizens, articulating itself in different scales of intervention, different design approaches and different objectives to be pursued. The ability of the research to involve a multiplicity of actors is also due to the significance - social, economic and planning - of the topic under investigation. The field of social housing, indeed, shows clear signs of an increasingly large gap between housing demand and the quality of the existing public housing heritage, which is more and more obsolete and inadequate. Precisely today, however, in the face of a serious economic crisis that has closed the real estate market off to many social groups, the potential of the public housing heritage is absolute valuable. The possibility of redeveloping that heritage, and in particular the so-called “sub-threshold” housing (housing not used because not complied with regulatory standards), represents both a necessity and an opportunity. The goal is to make them into an available resource to face those new forms of poverty that “living in times of crisis” forces us to face. These experimental solutions for mini-housing are intended for the weaker social categories, which don’t have access to the real estate market: they are the so-called “new poor”, a mirror of a country which is experiencing an ever greater rift between protected social categories and forgotten ones. This essay will illustrate the feasible design strategies – flexible, reversible, customizable solutions and set-ups – to prove that the regulatory “threshold” doesn’t necessarily correspond to the “threshold” of good living.