Collective housing as a good way to reduce city fragmentation

Today the study of the fragmentation represents an important occasion to meditate on the city and on the evolution of the relational strategies of settlements. If we analyse in a critical way our contemporary cities, we can see several interventions of the last decades, that brought, more or less consciously, to discontinuity and isolation (gated communities to the new ghettos). In this situation the individual becomes part of a small community; but how long does it can go on? Are the public and sharing spaces, in which we can open ourselves to the city and in the same time we can develop a sense of identity and belonging, well designed? Are they at human scale? A tendency, that can be observed in the modern western cities, is the intervention as collective living and cohousing that are producing urban continuities and community relations trying to institute relationships with the outside, always keeping their own differences and identities. Anyway the architectonic results don’t seem already innovative and the general quality of the interventions remains of low level. The innovative examples for collective living can certainly be considered positive for what deals with functions, topics and sense of community: spaces where liveability increases and where a rediscovered relation between Man and Environment is at the centre of the project, have been designed. So the lacking passage to completely solve, thanks to the cohousing projects, the fragmentation of the city, deals with the architectural aspect. Architects must underline the importance of the architectonical results in terms of language and spatiality to increase the integration capability of the intervention. In this case the design of architecture has a fundamental role for the next development of the city and for solving all the fragmented and inclusive situation