Dipartimento di Ingegneria Civile Edile e Ambientale

The exceptional nature of the current situation, together with the changes in the demographic and socio-economic composition of the population in Italy, obliges rethinking the conformation of the city for the three ages of the human being. The contingent calamity has also highlighted the limits and deficiencies of an inadequate and often undersized endowment of facilities for elderly care and assistance, with particular reference to the elderly suffering from multimorbidity, non-self-sufficiency and poor social support network. At the same time, the present reveals the problem of existing real estate in disuse, which is increasingly looming in our cities and territories. This proposed research intends to address these two issues synergistically, aligned with the Italian Government's National Recovery and Resilience Plan.
In architectural and programmatic terms - with a Health Promotion perspective - the study aims to safeguard the well-being, implement opportunities and health care models to ensure the elderly remain in the original family and social tissue favoring the maintenance of health and minimizing the risks associated with physical and cognitive decline. It also aims to define new shared living models to safeguard social and cultural inclusion even in the elderly, to support the so-called Healthy Aging. The proposal intends to insert these co-living and co-housing models inside carefully selected disused buildings, transformed and adapted to a new use, configured according to a flexible organizational-management scheme, to create places suitable for different ages of life. The ultimate intention is to provide new and effective models for intergenerational co-housing living in order to improve long-life course quality of life. The development of shared guidelines will contribute to implement pilot projects open to intergenerational users and ready to accommodate diversified residential, socio-cultural, and welfare functions.