VIRTUAL London.

Abstract

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Buenos Aires has been experiencing, for many years now, a strong crisis from many points of view: economic, social, political and cultural. The number of inhabitants concentrated within the city is constantly increasing, and many of them live within the villas, urban settlements mainly made up of shacks built with waste materials and rubbish, which develop close to the city centre. These are places where the quality of life is very poor, people who have no access to any public services and lack even basic sanitary conditions. The constant development of these unlivable places of living underlines the urgency of rethinking new paradigms of contemporary living in a sustainable way to try to improve the living conditions of the inhabitants of Buenos Aires. These traces are the starting point for an experiment in university research that seeks to offer alternative scenarios to the current poor conditions, starting with a re-reading of the history of social housing in the Argentinean context and with an eye on other Latin American experiences. In the background, a study on the current public policies offered by the Ministry of Territorial and Habitat Development, which, while on the one hand constitute an important opportunity for social and economic growth, at the same time present strong criticalities that, thanks to the European experience, can be mitigated. Rethinking public space, recovering buildings in good condition, demolishing uninhabitable spaces to give life to a new form of city that is more sustainable, offers new subsidised housing and creates design tools that are useful for politics and local administrations. A multidisciplinary and multi-scalar research project involving the University of Udine and the University of Moron in Buenos Aires, which through shared design tactics, ranging from intensive design workshops to collaboration with the municipality, can provide in a broad regenerative process new scenarios of doing architecture in the urban context.