It refers to other types of transformations (soft investment)
No
No
Yes
2023-01-15
As a representative of an organisation
Name of the organisation(s): Piazza Grande social cooperative Type of organisation: Non-profit organisation First name of representative: Isabella Last name of representative: Cioccolini Gender: Female Nationality: Italy Function: Communication Specialist Address (country of permanent residence for individuals or address of the organisation)<br/>Street and number: Via Stalingrado 97/2 Town: Bologna Postal code: 40127 Country: Italy Direct Tel:+39 340 105 0241 E-mail:isabella.cioccolini@piazzagrande.it Website:https://www.pop-house.it
Pop-House is a social housing project on the outskirts of the city of Bologna, in the north of Italy. Social housing in the European context is characterized by a wide variety of country-specific systems and policies: there is no common definition but all across Europe there is a shift from the offer of a home to that of housing services.
As Piazza Grande social cooperative, we are the community manager (social administrator) of the project, in partnership with the Municipality of Calderara di Reno, a town located in a rural area of the Bologna Metropolitan District, that owns the building in which it takes place and made a urban redevelopment public call about it. We won the call at the beginning of 2022 and since then we have implemented the project, after months of context analysis.
Pop-House is one of the first social housing experiences in Emilia Romagna Region, and the very first one for our cooperative, inspired by those in Europe and north of Italy; the main purpose is to offer its inhabitants a collective, lively and dynamic experience in 22 recently renovated apartments equipped with cutting-edge technologies, but still affordable.
It’s the first socio-ecological condominium experiment in the area, in which all the social elements are combined with a marked ecological attention, looking for the balance between human life and the environmental context. In the block, there are 16 more apartments and it is bordering two public housing buildings.
The living soul of Pop-House is made up of the colorful common areas such as activities room, a toolroom, a laundry room and a panoramic terrace.
It is a constantly evolving project shaped from the wishes and planning skills of the inhabitants, who have the opportunity not only to get involved in interpersonal relationships but also in the creation of shared activities.
Community
Housing
Sustainability
Empowerment
Sharing
Pop-House project concerns all three of the sustainable development pillars:
environmental, economic and social sustainability.
Being a urban redevelopment project, its tacit mission is to reduce soil consumption and concrete expansions, making a better use of the existing urban space with land recycling instead of building additional housing.
So Pop-House has renewed a block from a former residence builded in 1976, a building with a troubled history that in 2013 switched from the private property to the public one, with a huge redevelopment managed by Calderara di Reno Municipality and Emilia Romagna Region.
The program had a main focus on the environmental performance of the building, renovated with cutting-edge technologies such as photovoltaic panels and inductions cookers, still unusual in Italy.
There was also a boost of public transport in terms of bus and trains, to reduce travel distances and times but also to encourage sustainable mobility; besides, a bike sharing system is being implemented by the inhabitants of Pop-House, together with other best practice of sustainability such as a tools room to fix things reducing waste production, a shared laundry to save energy and of course recycling bins.
Lastly, many of the furniture for the common areas and short term staying flats comes from the second hand market managed by our cooperative.
Coming to social sustainability, the project addresses not only the housing basic need, but also inter-and intragenerational justice thanks to the social mix of the inhabitants and social cohesion, empowerment and participation in policy-making thanks to the community management activities.
Economic sustainability is ensured by the cooperation of public and private fundings. This means that Pop-House is affordable for the inhabitants: there aren’t subsidies for renters but they can rely on a controlled rental fee and on sharing resources with the community. The project is self-sustaining thanks to those rental fees.
Pop-House takes up the challenge of matching affordability and density of apartments to provide more accommodations with high quality in terms of architecture, public transport access and vast green spaces as social housing project which aims to counteract housing discomfort by increasing urban welfare within an integrated approach that devotes particular emphasis to issues of a social nature and suburban redevelopment.
The naming of the project itself recalls a colorful, lively place: each floor of the building is painted with a different color and so are the apartments. The long term accommodations were provided with a brand new kitchen and toilet(s), while the rest of the furniture could be fully customized by the inhabitants. The apartments for students and short staying were fully equipped mixing new furniture with second hand or vintage components carefully selected in our market.
All the accommodations have been renovated and the majority of them have a private balcony; the building also has a wide common panoramic terrace overlooking the countryside and bolognese hills, with a beautiful view of San Luca Basilica, and it’s surrounded by a green area with a free basketball pitch.
But the core of Pop-House are the community activities such as plays, concerts, workshops and tournaments co-designed with the inhabitants to stimulate the sense of identity and membership as an incentive for further participation in social life, not only related to the block, but also to the town: inhabitants can also benefit from an agreement with the next door sport center and with a fifteen minutes walk they can reach Casa della Cultura (House of Culture), a cultural center with a public library, an auditorium, a music room and many happenings and events.
Thanks to the short distance (15 km), they can go to Bologna anytime by bus or by train and enjoy theaters, cinemas and so on. The main point of Pop-House is having a home, but not being at home so often!
Pop-House's main focus is community empowerment, which means building and stimulating the capacity of communities to exert their voice and enabling them to interact productively in the design and implementation of policies and actions geared toward life quality and social inclusion.
The project it’s not only meant for people with a weak socio-economic background. Social housing experiences have shown that the concentration of units with strong socio-cultural poverty issues in one place, isolated from the city context, and in a sensitive number, creates a situation of marginalization and self-marginalization.
That’s why the Pop-House community is composed of a social mix: single, couples, elderly residents, families, students and foreigners to achieve a balance between individual needs of inhabitants and the social and economic sustainability of the community. We don't want to create ghettos, but rather a stimulating environment in which everyone gives their share and receives more.
Through the activities and recurring general meetings, our role as community manager is to catalyze and facilitate the group in acquiring power and finding their own governance setting in order to remove barriers to everyone's participation, because each member is supposed to contribute as he/she has needs and skills to share. Participatory approaches in communication will foster discussion and debate and the inhabitants are also encouraged to take part not only in the block’s life, but also to interact with the neighborhood and the town.
Of course, Pop-House also addresses the issue of housing shortness and unaffordability, by providing high quality accommodations at a great value.
The housing problems can be connected with other types of social exclusion problems, more or less evident, more or less related to the problem of having a roof over their heads. The house is necessary but not sufficient for the person to integrate himself into society: Pop-House is based on this idea.
Pop-House it’s actually shaped by its community: with other people living in it, it would probably be a completely different project. A social housing project is potentially a platform for numerous and interconnected activities, services and projects, precisely because it is based on the social, cultural and human wealth of the group of inhabitants, with their needs, skills and the energy that it brings with it.
The services had been developed on the basis of the needs and guidelines that emerged from the community building process, and they will also involve associations and centers already active in the area, enriching their activities and allowing a greater usability and attractiveness of the project itself and of the territory.
Speaking about the community, we are not only talking about people living in the 22 accommodations provided by Pop-House, but also about the other units in the building and the neighborhood, especially residents from the two blocks of public housing bordering Pop-House: all these people have been involved in group meetings and welcome parties to get to know each other, and they are fully part of Pop-House life now.
Thanks to this lively community, we are really rewriting the story of this troubled area.
The group has already organised some cultural trips open to citizens, a bookcrossing with the goal of creating a block library which could join the local library network, an ethical purchasing group and is in the process of implementing a vegetable garden and two recurring activities: swap parties and a film club.
Social housing brings together public and private actors in a multiple stakeholder configuration: Pop-House it’s a perfect example, as it is based on a block belonging to Calderara di Reno Municipality, which renovated it thanks to Emilia Romagna Region fundings, and then with a competitive dialogue procedure selected our cooperative as project manager and concessionaire for the next 6 to 8 years.
Even if there are no rental subsidies, it is clear that those public actors played a big role in shaping a framework for affordable housing which allowed the Pop-House community to flourish.
Ergo, the Regional Authority for the Right to Higher Education which works very closely with the Universities to ensure that students' needs are met, co-designed with us services for Bologna University Students and took part in their selection.
On a wider scenario Legacoop Abitanti, the national association representing Italian housing cooperatives, is planning to insert this project within the broader path of reasoning and planning on social housing which started in 2020, which generated tools of social impact assessment that will be tested within the project itself with the assistance of the Rec Real Estate Center - ABC Department of the Milan Polytechnic. Furthermore, Legacoop Abitanti has identified this as its own pilot project of a internal path of development of new living practices, and for this reason it’s financing the implementation of the Social Impact Assessment tool thanks to the collaboration with the ABC Department of the engineering school of the Milan Polytechnic, which supported us in the study and drafting of the impact indicators.
Dar=Casa, a Milan cooperative working on housing issues from 1991, is running a monthly methodological supervision of Pop-House.
Pop-House is then capable of attracting resources from subjects operating both at a local and national level, which strongly supported us in experimenting with new ways of living and making community.
The complexity of a social housing project such as Pop-House (property management, multi cultural selection, community building etc.) requires the creation of a multidisciplinary team, in which professionals with different training and skills can integrate the different perspectives and knowledge.
The team is made up of a project manager, expert in social housing projects and real estate management, which acts as a link between the team and the public client, two social workers for the community management activities, an administrative professional managing the facilities and the operations and a maintenance technician.
The team is meeting every week not only for updating, but also to share feedbacks and it carries out a monthly methodological supervision with Dar=Casa, an external cooperative from Milan.
In order to make the project a real asset for the territory, of course Pop-House also required professionals such as architects, construction companies, city planners and urban welfare experts in its first steps, co-directed with Calderara di Reno Municipality.
A communication agency was also involved in the naming and visual identity process, and a communication specialist is currently part of the team in order to help the community storytelling and activities promotion. Communication also played a huge role in the selection of the social mix that is now living at Pop-House, promoting and giving information about the call for inhabitants.
Since September 2022 we have been developing the impact assessment of the project together with the Politecnico di Milano. The first report will be drawn up at the end of March 2023. The analysis that we are carrying out are based on the theory of change. The expected impact, based on social housing experiences throughout Europe, is that
inhabitants will have the chance to become a real part of the community, developing new services and helping to sustain local businesses.
As we mentioned before, we especially look for an impact concerning community empowerment, which is more than the involvement or engagement of the group. It implies community ownership and action to pursue social change, and the development of new personal and social skills.
At the moment, a significant outcome for sure was bringing a degenerated and isolated urban quarter to life, improving the usability and attractiveness of the territory and overcoming quality of life issues and discriminatory attitudes towards the block, which had such a troubled history.
So Pop-House helped the perception not only of the block, but also of the neighborhood and the town: social housing projects are vehicles for attracting resources in a given context, characterized by a lack of some common resources, mainly social capital.
Another outcome was generating a circular economy system in the community, truly becoming a socio-ecological condominium.
The launch of the project had a big popularity both on national and local press, so also Bologna district and Emilia Romagna Region benefited from it; this also helped to raise awareness on the social housing topic, still underrated in Italy. Coming to numbers, the call for inhabitants got 229 applications from families, couples, singles and over 65 for long term staying and 30 applications from temporary workers and students for the short term staying.
Meetings and events can count on at least 50 participants and the community already implemented 3 new services.
Social housing is still an experimental field in Italy, a frontier yet to be explored.
It addresses lower-middle income people who cannot find an adequate answer to their housing needs either in the public housing or on the free market: the so-called grey zone.
In Bologna, there are some co-housing experiences, but not proper social housing. You may find families, or under 35, or marginalized people at the center of the project, but in Pop-House the main asset is the social mix of the community, which reflects the varied composition of the population of one of Italy’s busiest cities.
We are also the first case of a social housing bordering public housing blocks.
The main goal is not to barely fill the accommodations or even using them for housing emergencies or situations of social and economic fragility, because these fragilities combined with the ones of the two bordering public housing blocks - isolated as they are from the city context - risk recreating the premises that led the building to be a place of degradation on the area. The key factor of success of the entire project is the housing mix: a context that is able to promote and to circulate positive social and economic relationships (in the management of the house and the block), in relation with the rest of the town. A community that leaves no one behind and therefore includes everyone thanks to collective and individual empowerment and the vision that everyone could be an asset.
We can also say that Pop-House has a tradition-based innovation approach: this new form of collective and shared living finds its roots in village life, helping each other watching the kids, buying groceries, watering plants or just chatting over a cup of coffee.
The integrated management plan is also an emerging asset: as community manager (social administrator), we are responsible for both the community building and maintenance and the economic sustainability of the entire plan of development.
Pop-House requires specific methodologies for each phase and area: as social administrator, we work on property, facility and community management in a mono-provider model.
During the group building process, defining a community profile and using it as a reference for the inhabitants selection transparently supported the creation of a social mix, which the mere use of quantitative criteria could instead hinder. A commission including the project manager, representative of Calderara Municipality and field experts was created ad hoc to evaluate especially qualitative factors.
Once that inhabitants were selected and settled in, besides property management we started the community building process to:
- facilitate the flow of information through specific communication tools such as a Listening and Concierge Desk activated inside the building.
- propose opportunities for discussion: through identification of specific topics related to the building, residents are invited to participate in meetings or consulted through monitoring tools to reach shared choices.
- activate decision-making and management processes that require an active participation and led to identify the representative bodies, establish the rules of neighborliness, design and implement collaborative activities and self-organized services.
To implement this methodology, events are being organized in common and public spaces, aimed at promoting sociability and knowledges through non-formal educational methodologies and the creation of meaningful relationships, encouraging the emergence of needs and the re-activation of community ties with the former residents of the block, in cooperation with local associations and the so-called community leaders.
Coming to the daily workflow, our cooperative strongly believes in teamwork and provides supervision tools at all levels to exchange feedback and develop skills and knowledge. Group empowerment culture is indeed applied to the team.
One of the objectives of the project is precisely the construction of our model of social housing, to be adapted to the peculiarities of territory and social fabric: it would be inappropriate to talk about a model strategy for cities worldwide as each context has its own features.
Pop-House exalt the idea that social housing projects are a bearer of values and qualities of architecture, including urban planning, social, environmental and economic accomplishment that enrich the residential contexts in which they are placed.
This project is a relevant experiment in the panorama of the Bologna Metropolitan District, with a strong appeal for those entities that deal with urban regeneration and new models of living.
The main elements that worked in our project and we aim to replay, starting from other areas of the metropolitan district are:
- Cooperate with public actors and multi stakeholding to start with offering affordable housing, recovering abandoned or damaged buildings and without building new ones;
- Integrate housing with other functions such as leisure, environmental protection, social integration, infrastructural facilities etc;
take time to think about social design specifications in order to find the right social mix for a long lasting community;
- Work on community management and empowerment as global and local asset:
Community empowerment recognizes and strategically acts upon this inter-linkage and ensures that power is shared at both local and global levels. Once that the community is empowered, it will no longer need the community manager figure and it will be able to develop new ones;
- Provide good looking accommodations, in which people could feel at home and not in a dormitory. We have been inspired by pop culture for decorating, and we selected vintage pieces in our second hand market, both for avoiding plain standard furniture and to reduce our impact.
The global challenge that Pop-House is facing is the disintegration of communities under the weight of the housing issue, of precarious or poor work, of non-integrated migrants. We respond to the dare of an increasingly fragmented, atomized and individualistic society in which people find themselves alone to face their problems, often seeing the next door neighbor as an adversary, and not an ally. Here, Pop-House creates relationships, communities, bonds, building the confidence of being able to change personal situations and therefore improve the context in which one is inserted.
It’s about leaving and individual mindset to enter the collective one: that’s why the main selection parameter was the motivation to join a new way of living and not the personal economic situation.
Of course, homes that are affordable allow people to put a stake in their community, improving the space for everyone living there.
Our mission as Piazza Grande is centered on contrasting marginalization, and the housing issue is one of the crucial elements of this phenomenon. With Pop-House we try to imagine the house in a social and relational dimension: we think about the too many people for whom the times and costs of living in the city have become unsustainable, willing to create a model that contrasts the historic housing emergency in the metropolitan area of Bologna by addressing together students, families, people over 65, workers, foreigners.
The lack of affordable rental housing is increasingly recognized as one of the major challenges facing European cities, which got worse with the pandemic. Europe’s urban population is expected to continue to grow by up to 30 million additional people by 2050, and the UN estimates that despite the pandemic, 60% of the population will be living in cities by 2030. In Italy, this problem is one of the biggest issues, regardless of city size: with these new living experiences we can face it, one area at a time.
