ABITARE INSIEME. FAMIGLIA, CASA, CITTÀ

Investigating the dimension of family living was the key to understanding the research coordinated by the International Center for Family Studies (CISF) for the new volume Family Report 2024 Family-friendly homes and cities. Starting from an empirical survey of 1,600 Italian families, in collaboration with the Eumette company and with the contribution of Fondazione Cariplo, the analysis kept its gaze on the relational dimension of places, with the aim of verifying the relationship between family relationships and the quality of homes and neighbourhoods in which one lives. The areas of research and experimentation on the theme of housing, which has become a protagonist in the contemporary debate, are many and concern environmental and economic changes, new forms of cohabitation and new family lifestyles. Some recent research on the theme of collective housing in Europe in the 21st century shows how the current conditions of economic fragility, job insecurity, rental speculation especially in large European cities, as well as the loss of purchasing power of low-income families, forces people to share accommodation with other tenants, reducing individual spaces into spaces without the privacy necessary for the well-being and dignity of the people who live there. The theme of dignified housing is urgent and concerns a part of the population made up of single-parent families, students, people without a job or unemployed or in precarious work conditions, migrants. The inclusion of time and flexibility in the house project allows us to refocus the concept of the domestic environment, giving space to the theme of the adaptability of the neighbourhood and the house for different social, individual and family relationships. The appearance of Covid-19 has, in fact, forced us to modify the use of the spaces of the house by expanding their flexibility beyond the foreseeable imagination, introducing into the intimate spaces of the home all those activities that usually took place outside: work, school, free time. Working on what exists is a concrete action to preserve our material culture, taking on cultural and architectural responsibility not only for what is considered monumental or exceptional, but above all for that generic, sometimes anonymous, repertoire of public housing intended as a collective good. Total demolition and radical conservation thus come to delineate the two extreme poles of the relationship between architecture, inhabitants and social housing districts; these are two extreme situations, especially in Italy, characterized by disengagement, absence and progressive neglect of the State and local administrations, such as to leave ample space for the speculative real estate market. Research on the house allows us to observe society as an object of study, to explore and deepen new ways of living and different social behaviours and to produce possible actions as outcomes of new forms of knowledge through the architectural project.