Preface

This book seeks to envision some future scenarios in housing, outlining a series of possible transformations that will affect global housing models in the coming years. With a view to current times, the essays within are not intended to provide predictions on housing, but rather to try to grasp how social attitudes, economic values, and technologies employed are changing. The essays, which differ in slant and content, identify some drivers of change that are increasingly transforming and influencing global housing, such as global population growth, exposure to climate-driven risks, continuous ongoing economic crises, persistent levels of poverty, migration phenomena, exponential increase in the use of digital technology and consequent digital divide, and the urgent demand for more equal spaces by the most fragile populations.

The contributions of this book center around four main topics that are closely related to one another and linked to the aforementioned factors of change.


These topics define the boundary conditions of the structure of the essays. Each chapter illustrates the future potentials of housing linked to the unavoidable challenges of the present and the opportunities provided by digital technologies and economic management processes that were previously unthinkable.

The book outlines only some possible futures of housing, and each future necessarily implies several institutional and political visions as well as different site-specific values linked to the very concept and purpose of housing. Indeed, the concept of housing differs according to the diverse contexts in terms of economic, climatic, and social terms. For this reason, the essays provide a heterogeneous insight and a non-uniform snapshot of future visions, which do not claim to be exhaustive but are the result of such a broad, complex topic that is not easy to grasp within pre-established schemes.

The editor would like to acknowledge Livia Calcagni for her contribution in co-editing the book and the Department of Planning, Design and Technology of Architecture, Faculty of Architecture, Sapienza University of Rome, in which the exegesis work and conclusions were drawn.

> **Alessandra Battisti** Department of Planning, Design and Technology of Architecture, Sapienza University of Rome, Rome, Italy
