Reconstructing Italy: The Ina-Casa neighborhoods of the Postwar Era.

Abstract

At the end of the Second World War, Italy was socially divided and physically shattered, the former by two decades under Fascism, and the latter by the destruction of millions of housing units. At this moment of crisis action had to be taken to rebuild the nation both physically and psychologically. One way was through architecture and urbanism: the Ina-Casa plan for workers’ housing created more than 350,000 units of housing throughout Italy during two seven year phases (1949–56 and 1956–63) and the jobs to build them. Bringing together the efforts of politicians, reformers, architects, and even the workers themselves, the Ina-Casa administration as well as the neighborhoods they built provided an important means by which Italians re-imagined themselves and their national community in the postwar period. Of the many neighborhoods that were built three—the Tiburtino in Rome, Borgo Panigale in Bologna, and Villa Longo in Matera, are cogent as case studies that demonstrate the major results of the plan. Ina-Casa urban design and planning contributed to the prevailing tendency of locating the lower classes on the periphery of cities in part because it was easier to build large scale projects where land was cheap. In the architecture, often characterized as neorealist, the use of regional vernaculars reflected the desire of many designers to break with the recent past, but modernist characteristics, particularly in the projects of those who had practiced under Fascism also indicate continuity. Inside the homes, the domestic lives of millions of families were redefined through the provision of basic amenities such as running water, plumbing, and electricity and through the planning of spaces to reflect developing conceptions of the family. By increasing the basic standard of living of the most needy, Ina-Casa did more to unify the nation than any other earlier entity. From the exterior of Ina-Casa projects, however, the picture that emerges is of a fragmented and divided society, a nation weary of nationalism.