An interscalar approach to the recovery of degraded neighbourhoods of public housing

The work proposed here is intended to be a first synthesis of a research aimed at defining a possible model of analysis and design aimed to the reuse and regeneration of minimum urban aggregates and buildings, mainly of public housing, with high social and housing degradation. Social housing can no longer fail to consider the degrees of connection with the various social categories to which it is called to give housing answers and with the complexity of urban space in which it is rooted, looking for services and developing further degrees of interaction. Hence the need for a useful tool to highlight constraints and variables of intervention for the recovery of run-down suburbs. The particularly topical theme in Italy refers in particular to public housing neighbourhoods born after the Second World War of the last century. The objective of the analytical-deterministic tool which is introduced here in its preliminary studies is therefore to identify and balance the type of services required in a specific building aggregate, the type of residential offer planned, the distribution, the degree of connection, the dimensions and technical articulation of spaces in relation to the urban area of reference and to the buildings that compose it. The case study focuses on a popular and peripheral neighbourhood of the city of Bari. Here, starting from a preliminary identification of building aggregates with homogeneous characteristics (homogeneous area), it is possible to arrive at the classification of specific types of invariants and design variables. In this sense, this study becomes a preliminary tool useful to reformulate the residential spaces and services of social housing aggregates and to correct forms of social and settlement marginalisation.