Composing Landscapes of Living in Social Educational Work with People with Disabilities

Abstract

In Italy, Law 112/2016 regulates independent living projects for people with disabilities. It is part of a cultural and social policy scenario in transformation. The reductive and technocratic perspective of social educational work is in crisis while a paradigm based on housing and its ecosystem of relations is emerging. This paper draws inspiration from the generative grammar offered by the landscape metaphor (Morelli, 2020) and from the main results of a cooperative enquiry carried out in a system of services for people with disabilities in the District of Lecco, during the months of the pandemic emergency. The evolutionary potential of the crisis and the creation of spaces of thinking in the midst of uncertainty favoured the start of a process of systemic reflexivity (Rigamonti & Formenti, 2020) in which to imagine and design new landscapes of living for people with disabilities.

Keywords

• Social work
• Systemic reflexivity
• Landscape
• Independent living
• Crisis