Addressing Italy’s ‘Family Houses’ Stock. Emerging Issues and Perspectives for Policy and Design

Individual houses built between the end of the Second World War and the Seventies comprise 36% of Italian res- idential buildings. They are mainly concentrated in the “intermediate” part of the country, consisting of small and medium-sized cities, villages, and widespread urbanisations. Rather than single-family homes in the strict sense, these buildings are “family houses” closely linked to the owning families and their lives: self-promoted construction, continuous adaptation to meet inhabitants’ changing needs, cohabitation between different fam- ily nuclei within extended families, and transmission between generations. Today, this residential stock is con- fronted with obsolescence, a rise in maintenance costs, declining market values, and demographic and social change that radically redefine its prospects for use. In the last twenty years, policies have addressed this stock through two main ways: at the national level, tax incentives and volumetric bonuses to foster the redevelopment and improvement of energy performance; at the municipal level, within the urban plans, the possibility of demolition and reconstruction with an increase in volume. The paper focuses on some critical outcomes of these intervention methods. It proposes a perspective of inte- grating building policies and urban planning to combine the adaptation of the stock to new needs with greater attention to the context and urban quality. This paper is expected to be presented within the Panel discussion entitled “Retrofitting the Single-Family Hous- ing Stock in Europe — Policies, Experiments, and Future Directions.”