Abstract
The provision of social and affordable housing is a crucial objective in current debate and literature. In the absence of national guidelines, cities and towns in Italy are testing various ways to use planning instruments and housing policies. To a large extent, inclusionary housing (IH) programs play an increasing role in local plans. The results are often noncomparable, mainly because they come from different objectives and welfare policies. Nevertheless, they share both the abandonment of the expropriation mechanism as a tool to acquire land for social housing and a serious commitment to create a social mix in new developments. Although the primary purpose is to build social and affordable units, in some cases land value recapture is addressed too. The article aims to explain and explore the quantitative and qualitative outcomes of the ongoing IH programs, pointing at their different characters in different contexts, as a consequence of regional laws and local rules. The underlying question is to what extent such programs fully address public and private needs in the supply of housing, through the negotiation process and the compensation approach, in addition to competitions and bonus incentives as well as more innovative devices such as perequazione (the Italian instrument for the Transfer of Development Rights (TDR) and land readjustment).
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Notes
In this article, social housing is intended as ‘public subsidized rental residential units,’ whereas affordable housing is referred to ‘units for rent or sale at controlled prices.’
8,092 municipalities and 20 regions covering a country of almost 60 million inhabitants.
An additional quota of 17,5 sq.m./inhabitant is claimed for cities and towns with more than 20,000 inhabitants, to provide hospitals and healthcare structures, schools and universities of higher grade, and regional parks.
Unlike the Transfer of Developments Rights (TDR) programs in the USA, which are mostly aimed at the preservation of natural land, farmland or historic buildings, in Italy the Perequazione is mostly applied to urban or peri-urban areas to obtain land for free for social uses. Its main issue lies in the fact that the transfer of development rights from sending to receiving areas goes hand in hand with the transfer of sending areas’ ownership from private owners to the municipality.
In the US legal language, the link between the development impacts and the benefits gained is a matter of transparency and causality named ‘rational nexus.’
‘Governo del Territorio,’ instead of ‘Urbanism,’ is the expression that was introduced by a national reform at the beginning of the 2000s.
Under INA (National Insurance Institute) initiatives and funding, more than 335,000 low-cost dwellings were produced in 14 years.
Gescal is the acronym of Gestione Case Lavoratori ‘Workers’ Housing Management.’
IACP was founded at the beginning of the century, mostly operating in the construction of public housing to rent.
The definition may have been influenced by contemporary emerging EU rules on state aid.
Accordingly, the interventions do no pay any fee and the land is included in the mandatory requirements for all private developments.
The ‘gross area density’ is a ratio of 0,7 sq.m. of Slp (net floor area)/sq.m of St (total land, including 50% of private plots for constructions, and 50% of land to be dedicated to public infrastructures and facilities). It can be increased to maximum 1,0 sq.m. of Slp/sq.m. of St. This produces a FAR (net floor area ratio) of maximum 2 on private plots. A conversion of 1 unit = 100 sq.m. of Slp has been used.
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Acknowledgments
The article updates and extends papers I discussed at the PLPR and ENHR International Conferences between 2009 and 2011. It was completed during my research stages undertaken at the Radboud University in Nijmegen, the Netherland (2011), and at the University of California in Berkeley, USA (2012). I am grateful to Nico Calavita for all his comments and suggestions and to the editors of this special issue for their helpful support.
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Pogliani, L. Expanding inclusionary housing in Italy. J Hous and the Built Environ 29, 473–488 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10901-013-9361-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10901-013-9361-6