Inclusive practices for living together. A collaborative regeneration model for social housing neighborhoods

Nowadays, contemporaries cities show a problematic picture in which economic and environmental crisis and new social needs intersect. In particular, the social housing neighborhoods are affected by this crisis, revealing a physical and functional obsolescence that requires innovative strategies able to dialogue with the existing building heritage. Facing with this complexity, we must think about a project capable of imagining new scenarios, responding 'in the present' to the demand for a better life quality; a project which should be also able to persist over time, adapting itself to the ever changing needs of people. So, new practices for a more inclusive living must be defined, and, where already existing, enhanced. To reach this goal, it is required a new multidisciplinary, multilateral and multi-scalar approach, that looks at the inhabitants as the actors in cities production process. If social sciences have enriched the architectural practice through a qualitative analysis that has allowed to interpret the real inhabitants' needs, today the architects can take on these needs, creating new spaces for social cohesion through architectural practice. Defining new inclusive planning tools is the means to trigger inclusive regeneration processes for social housing neighborhoods that, in this way, can once again give appropriate answers to the quantitative and qualitative challenges facing our cities and which they will face in the future