Retraining of social housing in Pavia Francesca Turri*, Roberta Pernetti**, Emanuele Zamperini***, Viola Cappelletti * University of Pavia, Construction and Territory Engineering Department ** University of Pavia, Environmental Engineering Department *** Polytecnic University of Turin, Engineering of Territorial and Building System Department *francesca.turri@unipv.it , **roberta.pernetti@unipv.it , ***emanuele.zamperini@polito.it THE COMMITMENT TO SUSTAINABILITY IN REHABILITATION Italy: housing and social renewal of old town In Italy, after the Second World War, it was necessary to rebuild quickly the cities destroyed by bombing and restore the damaged residential property in urban centres. The lack of housing became untenable, especially in big cities and in northern Italy, because of growth in population, internal migration from countryside to cities and regions from the south to northern ones, where occurred the main economic and industrial development, with the attraction of large workforce. The economic boom was accompanied by a massive growth in construction activity, engaged in reconstruction and construction of infrastructure, factories and new settlements in the suburbs 1 . Whole neighbourhoods were built with public funds on areas outside the inhabited zone, because of the less cost, to restart the economy and deal with the emergency housing, to offer a home to urbanized population, and also to facilitate the use in construction of the less specialized labour, creating employment for veterans of the war. The public residential building activity continued until the eighties, creating a great estate of homes to rent for low-income population. In the urban centre the reconstruction and speculation involved significant intervention, with building demolition and replacement with reconstruction, volume increasing and thinning: this changes affect not only the damaged parts, but extended to the ancient urban texture, causing the change of the functions, the conversion of the residence and craft to service activities, a general increase of the property values, the subsequent expulsion of the population living on low incomes, a depletion of architectural and urban quality. Already in 1960 the Charter of Gubbio proposed the preservation and rehabilitation of the built environment together with the protection of the historical social context that characterized it 2 . In the Sixties and seventies, the debate on the recovery of the less-important historic building texture, representative of the history and material culture of Italian cities, was very lively and led to define an entirely new approach to the conservation of buildings, paying attention not only to the monuments, but to the entire existing building structure and its inhabitants. On these bases municipal building regulations were updated, and new rules for planning and technical regulations were defined. Manuals of recovery were compiled, based on knowledge of the typological characteristics, historical construction techniques and original materials; the means of intervention were ranked. The city of Bologna considered the preservation of the old town and its inhabitants, as the