In keeping with the objectives of Next Generation EU, the research deals with the issue of recovering and regenerating urban peripheries, and in particular, the large Affordable and Public Construction neighbourhoods built from the `70s to the `90s in the suburbs of major European cities. These urban areas constitute a vast and highly degraded public real estate asset and are the metropolitan neighbourhoods that suffered more from the pandemic, and that will be more affected by the economic and environmental crisis. The research aims to define replicable intervention strategies, protocols, and sustainability indexes that might contribute to restoring a positive identity to these areas. In specific terms, the following is proposed:
[1] to identify the features of contemporary and post-pandemic living through an in-depth survey of the housing stock, an analysis of the inhabitants' practical needs, and a review of the more innovative regeneration strategies implemented in similar community settings.
[2] to define and experiment with a methodology to assess urban regeneration interventions through the construction of summary indicators of complex phenomena that correlate urban dynamics and environmental, natural, architectural, energy, and social aspects.
[3] to verify the Italian regulations underpinning the regeneration interventions, with a view to proposing amendments that might allow them to be aligned with the more evolved models of recovery adopted at the European level.
The results, produced through a systemic methodology, shall be presented in a catalogue of initiatives suitable for immediate application, contributing to the drafting of a project with international partners in response to one of the Horizon EU 2021 -2027 calls concerning inclusive society. On the national level, the results shall provide support materials for the development of strategic and project planning by public and private entities undertaking initiatives to regenerate urban suburbs.
The innovation of the research lies in the tools it intends to produce in order to support and facilitate urban periphery regeneration processes in the environmental, social, and economic sphere - tools that can yield positive impacts, of enormous scope, on the metropolitan level.
In particular, it intends to identify more effective procedures, verified in terms of technical and economic feasibility, in order to quickly renew the residential housing stock and the characteristics of the public space with respect to the approaches already experimented with, taking inspiration from the best practices identified during the first research phase.
The research results will yield an operating protocol to which public and private parties may refer to successfully plan, programme, and carry out interventions to regenerate the peripheries and the public housing stock, based on rapid processes and contained costs, interfering with users' lives as little as possible while at the same time permitting a profound renewal of the buildings and of open spaces.
In terms of methodology, one of the potentials for the research to advance progress consists of accompanying these operating protocols with sustainability indices derived from integration among multicriteria and multi-objective analysis, that might support public and private operators in defining the interventions' best functional and morphological composition with a view to sustainability, while defining a useful reference for urban design aimed at reaching the targets set by the 2030 Agenda.
The national impact of the research will take concrete shape in the development of an interdisciplinary and detailed intervention methodology aimed at recovering the peripheral neighbourhoods under study.
This methodology, with its tools, is conceived to be directly applicable thanks also to a targeted census of the building stock, and capable of offering concrete responses to the social problem of quality housing with solutions that improve the environmental quality and performance of the building stock and public space by reactivating relationships and opportunities in the urban sectors involved.
We expect to outline intervention methodologies with potential nationwide application, thanks to the in-depth survey of the working-class peripheral neighbourhoods built in the large Affordable and Public Construction neighbourhoods of the 1960s, deemed representative of the problems of Italy's public housing stock. In this sense, potential applications are seen in the processes of regenerating the housing stock and public space initiated in many Italian cities (including: the National Sustainable Urban Regeneration Plan; the Innovative Programme for Quality Housing, the Integrated Urban Plans proposed by the National Restart and Resilience Plan - PNRR).
The possibilities to adjust national and regional regulations, as needed to permit urban regeneration interventions that are evolved and in line with the finest international best practices, validated through the application of intervention methodologies to a case study in Rome, constitute another potential for progress proposed by the research. This potential is particularly important because it can spur the evolution of construction procedures, foster the revising of housing types currently blocked by size parameters that fail to consider housing quality, and reduce the length of time between design and construction responsible for the reduced effectiveness of what is built.
Thanks also to the involvement of international experts even since the construction of the state of the art (from the very beginning), research products will be defined that can be applied on a European level, due to the recurrence of the characteristics of the urban system and of the typological and technological solutions of the industrialized residential constructions during the period in question. Beyond this, with a view to a subsequent research phase within the setting of Horizon EU, the research products will be conceived with particular attention to transferability in an international context. The intervention methods, outlined and applied to the national case studies, will be structured with respect to the European targets identified as specific objectives of the research, and will be examined in greater depth through additional design experiments to be carried out in the subsequent phase of international research.
The expected impact, then, is to outline innovative scenarios of intervention on urban peripheries and on the public building stock, that can radically reinterpret them by converting them from an environmental, social, and technological emergency to a precious resource for improving the housing quality of our cities.