Resilience: Co-fighting the crisis Emanuele Giorgi, Giorgio Davide Manzoni & Tiziano Cattaneo ABSTRACT The crisis we are living can be split into three fields: an economic crisis, an environmental crisis and a crisis of values. They are crises that affect different aspects of life, while remaining strictly connected to each other. Our Western society has not yet proven to be able to reform substantially itself so enough to respond strongly to this crisis situation. Moreover a pushed individualism makes stronger the perception of helplessness in front of the crisis. However, from various fields, innovative experiences are growing: they want to solve this situation, making the crisis as an opportunity to realize changes that can establish new relationships between people. This happens also in architecture, realizing spaces that can promote new ways of living. New forms of collaboration and sharing are being developed in the Western world: in particular, cohousing, co- working and co-design. These sharing networks have born as a reaction to the effects of the crisis but in the same time they fight the causes of the crisis itself. The research aims to compare case studies of cohousing and traditional housing with a reading tool that express the concept of resilience, in particular, concerning the concept of community. This comparison puts in evidence how cohousing can be considered a resilient way of living buildings and cities. These experiences arise often for economic reasons but the analysis shows how they produce soon other effects: they increase personal support and relationships; from the considered cases is observed that these forms of sharing promote often neighbouring production, local trade and environmental sustainability. KEYWORDS: Cohousing; comparative analysis; design strategies; text mining. Introduction on contemporary situation and opportunities It is indisputable that Western civilization is going through an important period of crisis, not just economic or environmental, but with wider range and dangerousness. The West is undergoing violent transformations. Supported by the rules of economy and by technological possibilities this situation is destroying, local realities, communities and individuals. Individualism seems to be the only way of life and the loss of personal relationships translates, as evidenced by numerous scientific psychological researches, in a reduction in the levels of individual happiness (subjective well-being, SWB) (Dolan, Peasgood and White, 2008). It is already clearly proved that society must rediscover the values of sharing and guarantee a sense of identity and community that facilitates troubleshooting and help to engage the challenges that the crisis cast to us. For these actual reasons is really important to deeply understand the features of shared living models. The purpose of the research was exactly this: understand if, in architecture, there is any kind of correspondence between cohousing and the concept of resilience. So if the practices of cohousing prove to be, for 79