Temporary Tools for Child Housing Welfare

In the last 10 years the cut of health and social services and the cut of public investment in housing policy have increase the unsatisfied social requirements of the population. This occurred when the Great Recession, which was triggered by a financial meltdown that started in the United States and spread rapidly across the globe, and has inflicted from 2008 the economic crisis on children. The gap between rich and poor families has widened in an alarming number of industrialized countries. The Innocenti Report Card series show, in the past five years, rising numbers of children and their families have experienced difficulty in satisfying their most basic material and educational needs. In this scenario the families with children that live in critical and uncomfortable situation are increasing. Often the situations is so critical and allarming that much more is the numbers of children turned away from the family to ensure his well-being. Starting from an analysis of the young people and his situation post crisis, the study translate the results of some recent local research about children needs and his unsatisfied social requirements, into a new model of younger housing that could prevent the long term stay in traditional structure for children removed from families and at the same time, meet the contemporary housing needs. The welfare system is called to review his priority of children services and first of all to design new social tools, like residential and semi-residential community for removed children, to answer at a new educational project, made of integration and temporary solutions. It’s necessary to rethinking the structures for children removed like “space of transition” in which the children stay like in a big family but to return in his own regenerated family as soon as possible. An event so relevant have meaningful economic and social effect that necessarily involve also a changed and new thought “architectural-design” of the system properties usability and of the re-planning and temporary reuse of the houses and spaces. The study focused on a real pilot-case based on public property in the Municipality of RO, Emilia Romagna. The idea is to think up an integrated system economic-technical/design-social that allow a new welfare system to be able to transform the assistance children’s needs into places and spaces economically sustainable, usable and that valorized the property public and private, creating virtuous net of solidarity, economic, fairness with temporary residences and proximity service. The aim is to identify new common tools and languages between architectural children temporary housing projects and the social project for young people, integrated in a temporary and proximity model. Temporary reuse of space becomes sustainable strategy because it introduces a significant new concept of use of the social assistance residence: not only space for integration and most secure residence, in which to put the children, but a new place of temporary living, in which children it is educated and integrated into a community along with others, in a physical and spatial transition, confidential place regenerated for the common use. Proximity, realized with a participatory-inductive method for the stakeholders and proximity in the architectural project, changing parting elements into architectural elements of inclusion: borders and margins are areas of proximity, hybrid, in which the meeting also social happens. It therefore introduces a new regenerative potential, not only space today unused and disposal of public property, but a much more interesting and explosive social mix, capable of intercepting social need, planning services, community response and lower costs. Create of light intervention strategies, which, through a minimal impact, work on the spaces left vacant. It now intends to work on the concept of proximity: social and architectural. Social through a new concept of understanding the detention of minors in public structures that include social integration processes, architectural in which the common indoor and outdoor spaces (gardens, spaces for socializing as for the well-being of the body or recreation) becomes an interesting system in the definition of barrier, no longer understood as a border or boundary, but as margin buying thick and that is modulated to meet the different requirements of use. Border and margin are concepts that refer to a variety of situations that are adjacent to something that is physically recognizable. Borders, and margins are areas of proximity, hybrid, in which happens the meeting, also social. The study provides the basic elements required to plan for housing and social services children’s oriented, through regeneration of a old vacant school building.