The Urban Potential of Multifamily Housing Renovation

Multifamily post-war middle-class housing in Italy represents a significant heritage which strongly characterizes urban landscapes. Although this huge stock has long been addressed by national policies as a major potential to pursue European climate targets, only the recent massive incentive measures (Superbonus 110%) have started to produce results for the energy upgrading of the buildings, offering alternatives and motivations (through the size of the public funding and the institution of the credit transfer) to the issues of the typical ownership fragmentation. However, these first partial outcomes are controversial from a life cycle, a social and an economic point of view. In addition, policies focus only on the energy performance of the single building, conceiving the interventions through a narrow-minded and generic attitude. The typological obsolescence and the multifaceted relationships between the building and the neighborhood are neglected, although important social, economic and energy efficiency benefits might emerge when addressing the renovation through a multi-scalar, multifunctional, and place-based approach. Stemming from the collection and analysis of ongoing initiatives and projects, possible models are outlined, enlarging the scenario of the transformations to include the urban scale. For example, underused private spaces can host new public or semi-public functions to contribute on the one hand to the management costs of the condominium and on the other hand to trigger local neighborhood regenerations. Moreover, widening the transformation perspective can envisage a group of buildings and the adjacent public spaces as a system to create energy districts where energy infrastructures introduce new amenities and added value.