Social, economic and environmental sustainability in planning community services

The topic of “community services” relates to their dual nature of intangible ac-tivities and spaces through which services are delivered. Today, while a rele-vant changing demand for community services is dramatically emerging, a need for larger flexibility of related “repository” rooms is also noted. Changes at a European level, apart from national or local situations, are re-cording complex phenomena of urbanization and consequently social exclu-sion: unfortunately, there is no appropriate housing planning to tackle the hous-ing emergency, inclusive of accommodation for migrants and services for an ever growing elderly population. All this occurs in a context of serious envi-ronment concerns and climate changes that cause droughts and floods aggravat-ing a pre-existent situation of environmental fragility across the territory. Thus, in these years we have been putting an unprecedented effort to innovate and regenerate the traditional service delivery models, inclusive of living and infra-structures. European and national investments are available but require greater (planning) capacity and management by public and private stakeholders (Ferrante, 2016). The effort - or rather - the challenge is to ensure a proper standard of community services by adopting design solutions with higher technical, economic, social and environmental sustainability content, able to tackle a seriously changing context.