Social housing in the Thirties in Italy. From construction to demolition of a "possible" heritage.

Between the two wars, the growing phenomenon of internal migration to large industrial centers and the violent processes of urban transformation generate a great house emergency in all the big European cities. In Italy the main institutions facing the crisis are Istituti Case Popolari, conceived by a national law in 1903. During the Fascist regime, the Milanese institute is one of the most important in Italy; not only because of his large production of housing, but also because of the quality of his architectural research. This contribution aims to reconstruct the history of Trecca, a neighborhood of social housing, built in Milan in the late 1930s by the Istituto Case Popolari and demolished in the late 1970s by the Municipality. This is one of the latest project drafted by Arch. Giovanni Broglio, the head of the Institute’s technical office, an absolute protagonist of the production of Milanese public housing in the first half of the 20th century. Built together with three other similar neighborhoods in the extreme urban suburbs to accommodate homeless families, it has been characterized from the outset as a place of physical and social marginalization. After the Second World War, the neighborhood underwent an ever-growing stigma, also due to the identification of those places as social control spaces during fascist regime. These low budget architectures have shown a ferocious degradation due to the almost total lack of maintenance and the pressure of overpopulation that has always characterized them. In the absence of a strategy that could progressively convert the neighborhood to a more appropriate function, demolition became inevitable. This contribution aims to reconstruct the process that led to a such radical decision, addressing both with social and economical consequences of the choices related to a sustainable preservation of a fragile heritage, like that of modern architecture.