Anziani e architetture inclusive [Elderly people and inclusive architecture]

With a view to an increasing longevity and a reproduction below the generation replacement threshold, in the coming years the demographic change will increasingly see the aging process of the population. In 2065 one out of three people in our country will be over 65 years old. The elderly dependency-ratio (between the population aged 65 and over and the population of working age, between 15 and 64 years) currently equal to 56.1% will rise to 59.7% in the coming decades (ISTAT). In 2021 the over 80 will be about 4.1 mil and the over 65 will be about 13.2 million. This demographic trend has led the European Union to take measures in 2012 to promote solidarity between generations and active aging by defining a benchmark. In this demographic and social scenario, ‘Senior Housing’ becomes an opportunity for real estate development as well as a need for evolution of residential models. The document investigates the relationships between the elderly target, with his own needs, his "being" in the context and his symbol of “scrap” comparable to the neglected urban spaces, and the architectural project, understood not only as a representative result in the space of a translated social need, but as a strategic process to redefine g the forgotten urban spaces, discarded like the elderly, according to the circular reconditioning method. The soil metabolism of the postmodern era has left scraps of an urban digestion, which heavily marks the profiles of our cities. Empty and abandoned spaces often aggregators of urban and social neglect. After an analysis of the social aging drop-out, the paper outlines a possible path from the social to the architectural scale, through an approach to the architectural project as a reconditioning strategic process able to dictate a contemporary grammar built of circular adaptive tools, for new urban over-writings.