Recover and Cohousing: looking for environmental and social sustainability. The intervention modalities for dismissed shopping centers, manufacturing and residential buildings

Nowadays, in the architectural debate, the issues related to the topics of renewal and regeneration are dominant. The requests of the new living needs and the innovate kinds of communities are spreading in the common consciousness. Several examples of cohousing, realized in a great part of the western world, can be considered as proof of this phenomenon. Those two topics can well match together for different reasons: not only for convenience and actuality of the proposals, but in particular for architectural and spatial reasons. There are residential buildings that, even if can be reused with low impact works, could well fit with the new cohabitation and socialization necessities. Those cases run because some functional zones, before marginally to the residential and nowadays no more used, can be recovered as shared spaces, changing the internal distribution and the connections between private dwellings. Furthermore dismissed shopping centers, manufacturing and small factories can be transformed not only through real estate operations that change them into lofts or speculative goods. With more attention and sensibility, cohousing projects can bring to a different way of reusing spaces that become the core for the organization of the programs. With this process, different solutions can be founded, allowing more flexibility of design and more possibility of integration between the units and functions that arrange the cohousing. Supporting the research topics and this thesis, we studied some samples and strategy schemes useful for the actions and guidelines that allow to spread the idea of a good combination between cohousing and recover of all the existing heritage. The interaction through collective living and existing buildings recovering allow to collect all the different benefits of those two actions, reaching a total sustainability: both environmental and social.