Inhabitat. Growing for healing

The work carried out for this thesis was considering the re-use of the rural architectural elements relating to the farmhouses, cascinas, in the Milan area and adaptation of spaces into a proposal for a new norm of living related to horticultural practices. - Firstly, a description is given for what the cascina is and has represented in the past, explaining its evolution, the actors involved in the cascina as a company and practices that took place in terms of the idea of co-living and production. It was necessary to make a cognitive picture of the current reality to evaluate the way we live and its impacts on the environment to find a possible solution to create a positive impact while regenerating the cascinas as architectural assets but also reviving the social solidarity to enhance a more responsible way of urban life. The project activity therefore had as its object the redevelopment of a farmhouse in the territory of the Municipality of Milan, specifically the Cascina Robarello. The idea was to create modular units of housing which can be adapted to different numbers of inhabitants around the centralised common spaces as vegetable and fruit gardens and a common kitchen that can be open to the public to provide better connections with the neighborhood and to develop a sense of community. The choices that made were aiming to reach a self-supporting approach, so as to have independence from several points of view: the construction, management, the food and the energy to address the most crucial problems found regarding human impact on nature, especially concerning Milan. After the analysis made on the ecological condition for Milan, what has been realized that the most effectual problem is the energy consumption for heating of the houses which endangers the quality of the air, followed by respectively agricultural activities and the traffic. Namely, the project topic of the thesis is focused on how to re-use abandoned cascinas, which there is a considerable number of in the Northern Italy, for creating an enviromentally responsible prototype of co-living spaces.