Back to School. Addressing the Regeneration of the Italian School Building Stock in the Latent Pandemic Contingency

In 2020, the health emergency put school buildings to the test, highlighting the limits of a dated heritage in need of urgent interventions. The approximately 40,000 buildings that make up the Italian school infrastructure are a layered and widespread legacy throughout the country, which now requires rethinking in light of the social, demographic, and pedagogical changes that have arisen in recent decades. The opportunity to invest in the existing school building stock, fuelled by national and European funds, requires an extended effort of exploration, analysis, and measurement of the school building heritage. In this framework, the Re-school research project was born to provide tools for systematising knowledge on the Italian school infrastructure. The main objective is to support the public authorities in strategic planning to activate a process of regeneration of the school building stock on a territorial scale. This article describes a proposal for a working method to explore the transformative potential of school buildings, thus allowing the adaptation of the existing infrastructure to face situations marked by sudden change (e.g., a pandemic or a drop in demographics).