Book of Abstract The Housing for the dignity of mankind

With the view to the sustainable rehabilitation, that considers Italian small historical villages not only as a cultural heritage, but also as a building resource suitable to be refurbished from the social-economic and technological point of view, the selection of a compatible and attractive housing model is crucial. Whereas most of small settlements grow from self-building processes linked to local resources and strictly connected to economic activities, mainly represented by agriculture and livestock farming, cohousing model seems to be efficient for its adaptability to specific local situations. Cohousing overcomes traditional real estate development model which considers the “final client” as an undifferentiated user, excluded from design-building process and it proposes his direct participation to the design of future housing context according to patterns that are never rigidly preset. The paper intends to introduce the results of a research applied to a case-study for which we arranged a methodology that guaranteed direct participation of users in defining operational guidelines of sustainable rehabilitation. The research deals with the design experimentations on some built-up areas of the historical village of Pesche, in Molise region, 3 km far Isernia, characterized by a variable altimetric shape and stone buildings. To this end, we select a representative group of users, heterogeneous for age, family, social and cultural backgrounds, in order to ask them about their interest in the use of shared spaces which have been preliminarily organized for macro-categories. To each macro-category we assign some coefficients which take into account the type of activities and the number of potential users in order to better define the fitting dimensions of shared spaces. Once established the cohousing model according to criteria of social and economic sustainability, the project focuses on architectural and energy rehabilitation which is based on building sustainability criteria.