Circular living. A resilient housing proposal

Abstract

The current climate change consequences, the migration phenomena, the pandemic, and the war affect the already unstable housing system situation. Implementing resilience is as necessary as ever to solve the existing housing crisis. In particular, a little number of housing units, lack of maintenance, the inadequacy of the heritage to the new housing needs, and weak attention to social aspects, characterize the Italian social housing system. Considering the possible powerful relationships between resilience, circular economy, and housing, this paper is aimed at determining whether and how CE principles can be applied in the social housing system to make it more resilient, adopting a qualitative research method. To this end, a model for Circular Living (CL) is proposed: it includes strategies at the building, neighbourhood/city, and territorial scales. It is extrapolated from the existing bibliography on housing system, resilience and circular economy; the analysis of the case study of south Salento together with its critical housing system and some emerging best practices. The use case of a 70s public building in Lecce is also presented. Although the CL Model is for the resilience of the social housing system in peripheral territories, future research could implement and validate the model in different contexts and systems.

Keywords

• resilience
• circular economy
• social housing
• flexibility
• housing distress