Urban Regeneration + Social Integration. Rome as a Case Study

Approximately 15,000 people in the city of Rome live in precarious conditions. This number is destined to increase given the current economic situation, which threatens to expose to the risk of poverty those once considered immune. This recessive trend must be summed with a preceding and rising phenomenon of foreign immigration. Recent events in the Mediterranean are forcing growing numbers to leave their homes for Italy, with many seeking international protection in Rome with high risks of exposure to social exclusion. These basic numbers describe the dimensions of a problem that has now assumed the scale of an emergency, most evident in such a densely populated city as Rome, which represents an emblematic case study. Its metropolitan character offers the possibility for a national and international comparison with the many cities, capitals or not, forced to confront a similar emergency. The gravity of this phenomenon, its extension beyond national borders and persistence over time impose a radical change in the approach to the problem of housing, which must be based on the recognition of the value of difference as an opportunity for enrichment and the consideration of cultural “contamination” as an effective tool for resolving an urgent social problem. A similar strategy presents architectural research with the primary objective of defining new parameters and new models for intervening in the consolidated city, recognised as the privileged context for the creation of social, sanitary and educational conditions favouring a cohesive multicultural society that recognises the right to employment and housing, supported by infrastructures suitable to a changing socio-demographic framework. Interventions to recover and modify the uses and appearance of potentially available abandoned existing stock may represent the strategic key for requalifying, defining a new identity and developing portions of the city; offering housing, public services and workshops for productive activities to immigrant communities, the homeless and those in difficulty without the need for additional constructions; for reinforcing the desire for participation and involvement in the fabric of social and community relations, for a greater integration with the urban fabric, in terms of architectural relations between the existing and surrounding contexts. The essay examines these themes by assuming Rome as an emblematic example, comparing two opposing case studies of the transformation of abandoned industrial buildings into housing; it looks at the potential offered by applying architectural design research to abandoned building stock, identifying and promoting original approaches to design focused on offering concrete and sustainable responses to the management of multiple forms of social exclusion, also through the activation of processes of “participatory urban planning”.