Dall’abitare nella città all’abitare diffuso. Coabitare in rete

“Abitare insieme” could nowadays be defined also as “Abitare diffuso”, a reinterpretation of urban settlement features and social and cultural values diffused in a large part of the Italian territory, characterized by a network of small local communities, institutionalized in this case by the “Unione dei Comuni”. From this point on the research project sets its goals in the constitution of a network of innovative housing services, with an integrated management, based on an analysis of the real needs of the inhabitants and developed through a mix of architectural typologies, matching tradition and innovation in social housing experiences, and introducing cohousing models in a public sphere. The initial analysis phase examined the housing needs in the Empolese-Valdelsa area and underlined the complexity of the situation, expressed by the requirements of a new user typology searching for innovative answers to the housing emergency. The causes generating pressure over this field originate from a different composition of families, in addition to the world economic crisis, and leads to the urgency of breaking the stereotype of the “house”. The principal goal of the research project is to give the Municipality the possibility to satisfy the request of that part of population excluded from the current social housing layout, using tools to support the design process and achieve urban renovation. The purpose is to define a new way of managing social housing through a network of apartments, according to an idea of “spread city” composed by small communities in the Empolese-Valdelsa area. In the aim of creating a new housing concept, characterized by sharing options and users mobility to offer a larger range of house typologies, the design process has to enlarge its functional tools introducing cultural and social mediation features to support the management of these new communities. According to that perspective the housing problem won’t be faced anymore as a simple matter of numbers and persons will regain the center of the collective housing debate, on the basis of a research of quality in the project process.