Eutopia urbana. La manutenzione ragionata dell’edilizia sociale

Urban regeneration is not an utopia. Utopia, as it’s known, is the title of the Thomas More book that describes an ideal society, conceived in a non-place (ou-topos). The place of urban regeneration, despite its optative character, has instead quantifiable dimensions and a definite place in the world. 37% of residential buildings in Italy originated between 1946 and 1971; of which about 800,000 units are obsolescent in terms of energy performance, of response to the earthquake, etc. If we assign to each of them 100 sqm gross we get 300 mc which, multiplied by the estimated number, lead us to 240,000,000 cubic meters: a prism as big as a football field 24,000 meters tall, of which a part not secondary is made up of social building. This is the place, you need to defragment in order to grasp its real proportions. Why does not reveal itself only in the peripheral metropolitan intensives but consists of a fine dust of semi-detached houses, IACP buildings, 167 etc. ... What makes it a unique place-object is the appeal of characteristics and patologies that the artifacts, despite in its typological and technological diversity, present. All these building quantities cannot be demolished or because it is too expensive to do so, one would not know where to put the remains and – according to recent studies – a demolition and reconstruction operation to be profitable should see doubled its initial volume ratio. What you can do, because the intrinsic value and the meaning of this housing stock (including the public one) are renewed, is changing the utopia in "eutopia" (eu-topos), transforming the non-place in a multitude of good places, to re-establish and care for. Trying different paths, from the replacement of windows to total redesign with targeted expansions and typological disruptions, working on what is already there. Operating on the basis of examples that come to us from other nations (Lacaton & Vassal, Castro, Kroll ...) to formulate new guidelines and organic techniques (and sustainable, also economically) of remodelage, congruent with the standard and reckless enough to be effective and valid over time, to retrain the buildings and the surrounding space. It will need to "listen" to what already exists, not to crystallize, but to suggest a revolutionary development, one of the few practicable in a building landscape that, full of empty rooms and after consuming thousands hectares of land, you may find that many good places are already (almost) ready.