HOUSING EMERGENCY: REQUIREMENTS OF RESILIENCE

The demographic pressure and the gradual urbanization in large cities determine constant housing problems. In addition to a growing and continuous immigration flow of foreigners headed towards the metropolises in search of better life conditions, there is also the section of the population who, due to a lack of income, or poor economic conditions, have no access to real estate market, not even to rented houses. In absence of quick responses, which fall in the common urban planning, the housing emergency puts the population in poor condition and turns into self-managed and informal responses which in turn become emergency. Although with different dimensions with respect to the megacities in the World, the Italian case presents common characteristics that, in absence of suitable preventive methods, prefigure an informal city growth. The city, a heterogeneous context that is subjected to sudden and chronic emergencies, requires flexibility and capability of adjustment to the variable conditions of all the urban systems. Therefore, the reference is to the concept of “resilience”, borrowed by the ecological approach and declined in several disciplines, as a thin border between flexibility and robustness, stasis and evolution, change of state and balance (Holling, 1973). Considering the resilience like the sum of coordinated processes, which increase the adjustment of the city and its inhabitants, the research investigates about what kind of contribution can be given by architecture to the overall resilience strategy. It examines whether there are some characteristic features (technological, typological, functional, procedural), for essential housing models which, once applied in a preventive basis since the planning phase, can contribute, even if indirectly, to the overall urban resilience by cooperating to ensure quick and adaptive responses, with low construction, management, maintenance costs, and low consumption of energy and resources.