L’edilizia a carattere sociale in Italia. Dalla legge Luzzatti al social housing

In recent years, the issue of housing hardship has reached levels, and taken on forms, comparable to those recorded in the sixties and the seventies. Since 2007, the domino effect of the financial-sector crisis, which quickly extended to the economy as a whole, and then became a pressing social problem, has heightened the demand for social housing, both in terms of emergency accommodations and in the so-called “grey area”. The Covid-19 pandemic exacerbated the situation, generating still more dire statistics. And yet, while in earlier decades the housing emergency was caused by a structural shortage in the stock of residential units, today the primary problem lies in the procedures dictated by the market for obtaining a home. From a disciplinary point of view, it is no longer just a question of planning and realizing a generic need for rooms per inhabitants, but of understanding in detail which houses to build for which families. The study of social housing, in the current phase of climate change, social-health emergency, economic recession, but also the relaunch of the post-pandemic that is mobilizing huge resources for our country, requires a renewed commitment to implement a strategy of structural reforms and tools aimed at achieving new housing policies. In this reference framework, the contribution, starting from the study of the problem in its various historical phases, intends to analyze the different regulatory, methodological and operational approaches, with the aim of highlighting the limits and criticalities, but also the evolutionary paths that could affect the production of social housing and the mitigation of housing hardship.