Existing residential neighborhoods in Italy: from strategy to project to activate a sustainable mutation process

There are numerous residential neighborhoods built in Italy from the 50s until the 21th century that are in precarious conditions, social, spatial and constructive. Its redefinition takes place with a theoretical and methodological approach that includes memory, innovation and sustainability leading the mutation of spaces towards the assumption of new value by using tools of hybridization. The proposal of the conversion of public residential buildings, and now characterised by a spatial and social alienation, is based on the architectural theory of circular re-conditioning: the contamination between place and object capable of reactivating the identity of "discarded" urban elements, where the absence of adequate space and energy-intensive buildings has led to a physical and symbolic obsolescence. The main tasks are the ones that follow: - A circular strategy based on the re-conditioning of the existing by recognizing a value to the current waste; - Define new adaptive intervention tools able to change spaces and redefine the boundary between reception and exclusion, and make buildings energy sustainable; - Equipping buildings with porous spaces to accommodate those in need (for example for homeless but not only) The methodological process uses the one proposed in 2003 by Haeckel, Adaptabily loop, updated on 5 points (one new): the sense, which defines a new spatiality for housing, the interpretation where the elements of the process take shape, both circular and adaptive, redefining the sense of identity through architecture and a participated communication, the decision defines the intervention strategy, resilience, the ability of a system to adapt to change following a high impact event; the act determines the operative tools, a series of "adaptive grafts"; the outcome, a project that combines architecture's own tools with social and and energy savings ones that can revitalize a neighbourhood and make it habitable again.