Establishing shot. Housing Complexes in Bologna and Florence

In the late 1950s, the development of suburbs in Bologna and Florence shows similarities in dynamics and structure. The collective residential buildings in the districts “Pilastro” (Bologna) and “Sorgane” (Florence) represent two paradigmatic examples of such a process: their location is very distant from the ancient urban fabric of the two respective towns. In these buildings, many families moving in from the country or from Southern Italy had the opportunity to find a self-contained flat with a bathroom.These two examples highlight the peculiarities of a phenomenon that rarely affects residential complexes: at first, they had risen in the context of council housing. Afterwards, the greatest part of their considerable extent turned into middle-class neighborhoods. The aim of this paper is to highlight the different strategies used to analyze both residential units: the first step of the research focused on general aspects. Then, the focus shifted to the description of specific data. The raw material was made up of multiple layers of sources such as archival research, interviews with architects, politicians involved in the projects, and inhabitants. This tangle of threads was unraveled until it finally managed to reveal two aspects. The first one is how the social status of the inhabitants has changed over the years. The second interesting aspect is that, although the realisation of both districts involved a large number of celebrated architects, the very inhabitants explicitly asked for and obtained several changes in ongoing architectural projects and urban planning