Adaptive Socio-Technical Devices _ Social Inclusion as a Rehabilitation Tool (original) (raw)

2018, Sustainable and resilient building design _ approaches, methods and tools

The complexity of the contemporary city is determined by socio-economic and demographic changes and by new energy standards that bring us to consider the rehabilitation of the building stock as a crucial and complex issue. The concept of sustainability requires an adaptive “integrated rehabilitation”, in order to upgrade buildings not only from a structural, energetic, and architectural point of view, but also from a functional and social one. The research considers one of the most outdated sectors: residential multifamily buildings of the post-war years, which are today at the centre of a debate on their functional, security, and typological obsolescence. The need for urgent refurbishment, while avoiding demolition, brings us to consider the importance of additive strategies for regeneration, which include social, management, and financial feasibility. Some of those strategies are recognisable as “socio-technical devices”: artefacts in which technical issues are strictly related to social ones, for the efficiency of the whole system. Socio-technical devices in building technologies for refurbishment allow us to manage the complexity of a construction site au milieu habité, facing the problems related to residential functions in the rehabilitation of multi-storey buildings. Starting from the definition of this concept, the research investigates, through the analysis of European case studies, new scenarios for renewal processes to prevent the breaking point of the city as a system, for a more resilient, adaptive, and bottom-up intervention strategy.