At Home. From emergency shelters to temporary living

The right to housing is recognised as a primary right for the realisation of every person, as is the right of displacement, understood as the right to move to improve one’s living conditions. Today, people with unstable living and working conditions due to a multiplicity of social and/or geopolitical factors, are hosted in precarious housing located on the suburbs of the city. This model replicates the one used for the management of emergencies such as earthquakes and/or catastrophic weather events. Many of these post-disaster shelters although capable of generating their own 'social microcosms', are in a state of degradation that reinforces social alienation: we could call them 'places of exclusion'. The research presented below proposes to overcome the emergency model starting from some reflections on housing rights in relation to urban regeneration processes observed in some alternative European examples. The hypothesis that this research is trying to test is that temporary homes can be placed within urban centres and should be part of a broader regeneration project that promotes integration.