Martina Gentili
Urbanism
Utopia of Normality
Rome is facing a growing housing shortage. Failure to regulate market dynamics caused a great mismatch between demand and supply. As a result there are many vacant dwellings and thousands of people struggling to access affordable housing.
My project tries to find a smart way of making the empty houses meet the homeless people, by proposing a policy that includes taxation on vacant property and the expropriation of vacant dwellings in order to transform them into community managed social housing.
As a case study I chose Porta di Roma, an unfinished and vacant residential development. The implementation of the policy is the trigger for a a general long term strategy at district level, as well as neighbourhood scale strategies for public space, plinths and facades.
This project seeks to draw attention to what is wrong in Rome’s housing market by proposing a utopian solution to it in Porta di Roma.