From Housing Units to Urban Communities: A visual narrative of Urban Housing Coop.net experience

The contribution aims to narrate, also through a comic-style visual story, the Tuscan experience of the Urban Housing Coop.net network, which is experimenting with an evolution in social housing governance towards an Urban Housing model. This approach entails radically rethinking the relationships between inhabitants, housing and urban spaces, and services, shifting the perspective from individual interventions to embracing the entire urban context. The network, promoted by the Cooperativa CooperToscana, was established in 2020 with the Abito in Community program, launched by the social manager of social housing interventions within the Fondo Housing Toscano. The goal was to experiment with a new model of housing welfare in three social housing projects in the Florence metropolitan area through the Fai la casa giusta program, co-financed by the Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Firenze. Since 2023, with the Verso l’Urban Housing program, the network has expanded its scope, promoting a system where collaborative communities, cooperatives, and third-sector organizations work together to provide integrated housing services, monitor and activate the neighborhood, and improve overall urban life quality. This initiative represents a concrete opportunity to experiment with effective public-private partnerships while also fostering the growth and strengthening of relationships among the cooperative and third-sector entities involved. This experimentation aligns with a broader European framework, which has been increasingly focused on housing welfare policies based on affordable housing. Here, housing, social, and cultural welfare dimensions are integrated into a system capable of generating synergistic impacts, strengthening community cohesion, and enhancing collective well-being.