LIVING TOGETHER: (THE MULTIPLE) ‘STORIES’ OF AN ORDINARY HOUSING DEVELOPMENT IN POST-WWII TURIN

This chapter examines the history of a housing estate built between 1968 and 1974 in Moncalieri, near the Italian city of Turin and designed by the local architect Enzo Dolci for the emerging local middle-class. Discussing this pro-ject, I would like to reflect on the role of micro-histories and residents’ memo-ries in the shaping of a broader understanding of the practices related to the production and use of Italian postwar large-scale collective housing.1Only occasionally has the history of postwar Italian housing been ap-proached looking at the residential culture, the lifestyles and domestic models of the emerging urban middle class: a social group whose aspirations, in terms of living comfort and modern lifestyles, have had a lasting impact on the phys-ical and economic transformation of cities in the country.2 Architectural stud-ies offer a clear example of this forgetfulness: established narratives on collec-tive housing projects have, so far, either paid tribute to a limited number of experimental cases touted by prominent modernist architects, or concentrated their efforts on the projects promoted through the state initiative.3 This atti-tude consolidated the understanding that the evolution of postwar Italian cit-ies could be largely, if not fully, comprehended through the histories of re-nowned public estates.4 This perception is confirmed if we look at how images and catalogues of exempla featured by architectural guides of the 1980s at-tempted to establish a canon of Italian modernism. These documents rarely feature the multifaceted and stratified reality of the most “ordinary” housing complexes and neighbourhoods built between the 1950s and the 1970s. The scope of this article is to partially question this view, showing that the tangible traces of this ordinary production had a crucial agency to define the contem-porary built environment.