Symbiotic architecture in suburbs

Recent international economic crisis highlighted the limits of present development models. In the light of problems arising from land consumption it’s necessary to question the models of unlimited urban expansion acting on cities with new strategies for requalification and enhancement of dequalified spaces through rational densification of existing urban fabric. In many countries we can observe examples of ongoing densification processes, that provide reinterpretations of consolidated urban fabric types in which they act: in Beijing some examples of the insertion of new volumes into historical fabric manifest an attempt to protect the siheyuan through their upgrade; in the UK there are many examples of addition of new volumes for the expansion of terraced houses, with the partial saturation of their courtyards; in North America, where urban sprawl generated endless suburbs of isolated houses, new buildings were placed in the spaces between a house and the other; in Paris apartment blocks suburbs, starting from the rereading of critical issues of urban fabric the upgrading and retrofitting of low-quality social housing was obtained through articulated interventions of volumetric addition. Furthermore, the paper proposes a rereading of Italian suburban districts and their requalification through densification interventions by rational interventions of symbiotic architecture.