Abitare Mirafiori Sud. Spunti per la sperimentazione di un sapere operativo

During the twentieth century, the housing question occupied a central role in the development of the architectural debate. For a hundred years, disciplinary research has proposed, interpreted, and suggested new ways of living that, at the same time, reflected specific ideas of the city. In recent years, the discussion on the city seems to have recovered a central space in the articulation of political discourse, paradoxically coinciding with a substantial absence of specific disciplinary proposals. Faced with the current panorama, in which new actors appear, in which the promoters are fragmented, and in which the capacity for public intervention is reduced to minimal levels, some crucial questions arise from which to rethink an operational role for architecture: what are the answers that the discipline is called to give today? Is there a space in which to act operationally starting from the construction of specific knowledge? What role can the project have in the definition of policies (public and/or private)? What tools are available to us? Starting from these concerns, we have built, convinced of the intrinsic capacity of the project as a tool for research and operational validation, the theme on which for two academic years (2014-2016) the students of the Master's Degree in Architecture Construction City of the Politecnico di Torino have been confronted. The pedagogical proposal involved the rethinking of the buildings and the plot of public spaces of the historic district for 12,000 inhabitants built in the early sixties by Ina-Casa in Mirafiori Sud. In this experience, investigating the contemporary urban condition, confronting the transformation of an urban fabric characterized by criticalities, potentialities, and spaces for action, students carried out a work on the built heritage and on the existing public spaces proceeding in a perspective attentive to the urgent issues, not only for Turin but for all European cities: the economic crisis (social and institutional) and its effects on the transformation of urban territories, the phenomena of divestment and transformation of city soils, the redevelopment, recycling, and reuse of the residential built environment, the new housing needs and buildings retrofit, the maintenance and care of open spaces in relation to new collective practices, the transformation of public services in a new conception of urban welfare.