Designing resilience as a variable of sustainable development. Deductive methodology contribution for essential housing requirements

In a context of social and demographic changes, characterized by the reduction of waste and lower land use, the environmental, economic and social issues become a central challenge in a general framework of sustainable development. The increasing exposure to risk factors such as climate change, lack of resources, pressure of the continuous migratory flows, difficult economic conditions, represent a source of chronic stress and a reason of continuous instability for urban contexts. Indeed, the strong population pressure on megacities determine a constant housing problems, which have an impact on the urban contexts that, considered as economical attractors, are desired by a large segment of the population. In addition to the continuous and growing immigration flow there is also a population portion that, due to the poor economic conditions, can’t have access to the real estate market, not even for rent. The dimension and the heterogeneity of housing emergency, and the environmental and microclimatic impact of the anthropic presence in urban contexts, are the main elements for which the cites must provide cheap and sustainable housing solutions that can be easily built, with a net-zero energy consumption and low environmental impact, with flexible technological characteristics, in order to ensure a response to users who are heterogeneous by social background, habits, income and lifestyles. Without fast responses of traditional urban planning, the housing emergency turns into self-managed and informal responses that become itself emergency. So the city system, and its subsystems, must develop adaptation methodologies that do not compromise its own structure, even facing emergencies, and that include in the general sustainability concept also the resilience requirements. Considering the resilience as the sum of coordinated processes which have the consequence of increasing the adaptation capacity, the city must be resilient to the changing conditions, in order to preserve stability, and face the constant stress of chronic emergency planning fast, low-cost and zero energy housing solutions. This PhD research has investigated the architecture contribution to the Resilience Framework focusing on resilience requirements and distinguishing characteristics for essential housing models which, applied in preventive design stage, could contribute to the overall resilience of the urban system. Considering resilience as a feature present in many areas, but encoded in few ones, this research has structured a complex methodology which, through the Case Studies analysis (chosen from state-inhabitant cooperation projects for the informal settlements prevention) and through the analysis of the informal settlements typological aspects (such as the user’s practical responses to a need), has defined a user-specific needs profile and has extracted some specific requirements and best-practise of resilience useful to support also the social, energy, environmental and economic sustainability. Assuming the meta-design reference, the research has drafted a “Framework of technical indications for essential, new and temporary housing construction”, structured into “Technical Sheets for the Design”, containing technological, typological, functional, procedural information, useful to all those involved in resilient design processes that cooperate for quick, adaptive responses at a low cost for construction, management, maintenance and low consumption of energy and resources.