Sustainable rehabilitation and densification of a public housing neighbourhood in Milan

In 2012 our research team was tasked by the Agency for Public Housing of the Lombardy Region in Italy with carrying out a participated feasibility inquiry for the renovation and extension of a publicly owned social housing complex in Milan. The complex featured the qualities for the attainment of a good quality of life, but was stricken by insufficient maintenance and scarce possibilities of improvement due to technical difficulties of upgrading to code compliance. In 2008 the complex was singled out for complete demolition and destined to building new mixed-ownership residential units implying a doubling of the number of apartments and a new rent/ownership ratio. The complex was indeed underused and might have been considered inadequate for the creation of new apartments. But in the opinion of the authors a complete demolition was not the most viable option. The latter view was also shared by the inhabitants, that with their firm resistance succeeded in stopping the demolition and obtained the commissioning of the here presented feasibility inquiry. The strategies defined for that task took a stance with respect to major themes of the contemporary debate, like: the integration of "parasite" architectures as opportunities to increase the space available to apartments; densification as a strategy against land consumption; energy saving and environmental impact reduction as core design objectives; the definition of new housing typologies allowing for flexibility and adaptability to evolution processes; the harnessing of a grass-root participation of the inhabitants. The paper presents analytically the results of the mentioned participated feasibility inquiry carried out by the authors together with inhabitants of the complex.