From Council Housing to Social Housing. The successes and misfortunes of Social Housing policies in Italy

The issues dealt with are three: the need for medium - and large - scale territorial planning; the quality of housing; the solutions to guarantee secure flows of financing to launch programmes of public residential housing (ERP). A premise of any ERP programme is the planning and construction of a fast rail network to guarantee mass mobility. Once this premise has been satisfied, it is possible to identify agricultural areas to be expropriated for ERP interventions. This programme is characterised by operating above the municipal level, and it requires a structure that has the administrative powers of an agency. As regards the quality of housing, the following equation has to be dispensed with: public residential housing = ugly building characterised by alienation and anomy. Planners from this century have been called on to rise the challenge. To be certain of obtaining finance for ERP programmes, the old road of contributions at source from workers should be pursued as well as the establishment of a single fund that gathers together all the financing foreseen by laws made over the years and not spent, set aside for ERP.