UNIVERSITY RESIDENCES AS A TOOL FOR PUBLIC HOUSING REGENERATION

Nowadays in Rome public housing suburbs face several critical issues, both physical and social: buildings obsolescence, state of neglect of open spaces, inhabitant’s sense of segregation and lack of social inclusion. These critical issues cause a huge reduction in inhabitant’s quality of life. The regeneration of such areas should become one of the main topics in the transformation of urban neighbourhoods. Effective regeneration actions should look at: physical issues, upgrading energy and structural anti-seismic behaviour of buildings; typological issues, transforming accommodations in relation to the contemporary needs; social issues, promoting interventions of age and profession assortment; economic issues, improving the presence of local shops and restarting local enterprises and employment. University Residences become a useful means to reach the goal of public housing regeneration due to its own redevelopment features: mix of functions such as dorms, teaching and leisure spaces that could fill the gap of the existing buildings lack of services. From the typological point of view, the regeneration achieved by the infill of university residences is characterized by the addition of basic and small “housing cells” integrated on a main access path. These “housing cells” could be easily inserted in public housing complexes, recycling and renovating accommodations that are no longer suitable to guarantee healthy, comfortable and accessible living such as the ones located at raised ground floors or at the top ones. The main goals of such regeneration process are: the reconfiguration of the larger flats, usually empty or under-used; the transformation of ground floors flats; the change of function of unused spaces such as washing rooms; the rehabilitation of open spaces such as courtyards and paths. Last but not least, important goals could be reached in the social field: news users, added to the ancient ones, will be students and researchers so to enlarge current social categories. The regeneration becomes an occasion even to propose a global retrofitting of the buildings, so to achieve important structural and energy upgrading. The article contextualises the topic on public housing complexes of the first half of ‘900, giving a huge description and classification of them, and it presents a regeneration intervention on a building in the suburbs of Rome, known as Stalingrad, today interested by important urban fluxes due to the presence of a new underground station.