Social Innovation and Environmental Sustainability in Social Housing Policies: Learning from Two Experimental Case Studies in Italy

This chapter critically examines approaches and solutions developed by social housing to sustainably respond to the housing emergency plaguing contemporary cities and Italian cities in particular. In a broader perspective, we also investigate how housing has become 'difficult' in Europe and the poorest segments of the population run the risk of having their right to housing dramatically denied. Analysing housing in terms of its procedural dimension, we focus on two Italian case studies that evoke a new way of inhabiting the city, cases in which high standards characterised social housing and yet remain accessible to all. The Sharing hotel residence in Turin and Zoia social housing in Milan combine housing with other socially innovative measures in a framework of sustainability and avant-garde construction. These are significant examples that speak to issues such as temporariness, flexibility and the coordination of measures. These two cases both pursued objectives having to do with social, planning, architectural and environmental quality, albeit each in their own way. There are by now numerous examples of social housing in Europe and these have recently attracted growing interest in Italy as well; in this country, however, such projects represent valid instances of experimentation but are not at all widespread.