**5. Conclusion: it's not just a house**

In Western society, the difficulty of accessing housing is one of the reasons why social inequalities among the urban population are growing; this also happens because public intervention in support of housing policies has gradually been reduced to the point of cancelling itself out [6]. Each European nation has prepared interventions

**Figure 23.** *Social project, Corviale si-cura. Credit: Laboratorio di Città Corviale.*

that are partly different but are united everywhere by choice to sell public residential assets and by growing use of the market and intermediate forms, such as social housing or relatively affordable houses to cope with the demand from the middle classes. Direct public policies that provide for the construction of housing for the less well-off social classes are lacking or at least marginal. In Italy, a further complication has been added; following the process of federal devolution, housing policies have been entrusted to the regions, which in Italy are twenty. Each region has produced at different times and with very different references, choices and in some cases, very different organic housing policies, and it is not easy to return a unitary picture of public action in Italy. Overall, the latest data on the construction of public residential housing in Italy stops in the order of a few thousand; the 1993 data, at the end of the twenty-year golden cycle of public construction in Italy, were about 40 thousand new accommodations per year. In this context, the Corviale regeneration intervention with the replacement of self-built housing by the 'squatters' represents a unique case that indicates some lines of action for possible interventions.

Meanwhile, the regeneration processes may involve the transformation of environments already built through the change of intended use from services or offices or more to public residences to be rented to the neediest families. Even if it is about houses, what comes into play is much more than just a house. It is a readjustment process involving urban and social impacts, even when it has a predominantly building character. The mechanisms underlying the regeneration processes necessarily involve the inhabitants and institutions in a dialogue, which, as demonstrated by the

activity of the 'Laboratorio di Città Corviale', constitutes the prerequisite for the regeneration process to achieve its aims and be successful.

A second lesson given by Corviale is that we can go back to designing in public neighbourhoods, a legacy of the modern movement, and find there, in those neighbourhoods, new possibilities for densification or rather intensification, in the use of the already built space that is often abandoned and underused. It is a space of action for the urban project connected to the housing demand that is also particularly important for the design results that may involve redesigning some of the principles with which those neighbourhoods were conceived and built. In some cases, fifty years after their construction, it is now possible to imagine a rehabilitation intervention that represents a new urban stratification that considers the adaptation processes that the inhabitants have brought into these architectures over time, in some cases, real machines for living. A third lesson concerns the forms of living, end of a housing model, which was concerned only with responding to the basic needs of a shelter house, has long since been sanctioned. Today, even in public housing, it is essential to focus not only on the house but on the model of living, knowing how to identify the neighbourhood even before the space of the house. In common space, necessary for the sociability of being together is presented as the place for constructing the public dimension alongside that of the private, single and individual dimensions. This alternation of rhythms and times configured in diversified spaces and housing solutions is now unavoidable in every housing project.

Moreover, finally, there is one last lesson: the processes of regeneration are accompanied by an activity of roots, which we can also call identity, which passes through the production of heritage. It is an activity that involves different aspects. Important among them are those that also involve spaces, the construction of collective memory, and the layering of signs due to cultural events intended to leave a mark on the neighbourhood's lifestyle. In the 'Laboratorio di Città Corviale' activity, participation in tenders for the Roman summer or the promotion of social and cultural integration activities has been a decisive factor in the success of the laboratory's activity and in achieving the objectives pursued by urban regeneration interventions. Ultimately, it is an agency activity that starting from the inadequacies of public institutions, especially regarding housing in sensitive neighbourhoods, carries out an important activity to promote the possibilities of the neighbourhood's physical, economic and social transformation, a role that still focuses on dialogue with the inhabitants and their direct participation in mediation. The protagonist of the inhabitants is not a convenience of the institutions, the tenders or the projects financed within the framework of specific projects represent a constant presence in the neighbourhood of this accompanying activity. 'Il Laboratorio di Città Corviale', set up by Roma Tre University, represents a case study to understand the new housing demand and the new lines of action to create public housing and accompany the physical transformation of neighbourhoods.

In conclusion, we can say that the four-year experience of regenerating Corviale, which is still ongoing, can be an important case study in the field of housing policy and public policy to observe to guide the future of housing policy. Particularly in terms of interventions in the already existing, in the already built city, where the goal is undoubtedly to make the right to a house accessible, but where the integrative dimension of urban policy also comes into play, it is about giving a house, but let us talk about much more than the individual house, it is the right to the city.
