Oltre l'abitare pubblico, verso l'habitat sociale

The Villard Seminar on the city of Taranto provides an opportunity for a more general reflection on the condition of public housing and the structural adjustments and functional rethinking that are necessary in a period of great change such as the current one. The rehabilitation of public housing estates can represent an important opportunity for urban regeneration through which to intervene in a more structural and resilient way in the neighbourhood and the entire city. This is demonstrated by the research and design experiments on Taranto collected in this volume, but also by many examples of urban regeneration in Italy and Europe that propose reconversions of living models, with solutions of co-housing, new shared spaces, and the expansion of services. The contribution aims to investigate the meaning and possibilities of this type of interventions, on the one hand with a theoretical reflection on the meaning of public housing, which today perhaps finds a more complete and precise definition in the new expression "social habitat", and on the other hand through some recent international social housing redevelopment projects that have focused primarily on open space for connection and aggregation as an engine of activation and a cohesive element for the community.