A home designed to test housing autonomy of disabled persons
The “Casa Arcipelago” project stems from the desire to achieve an innovative experiment to foster housing autonomy of persons having light or medium intellectual and/or interaction disabilities, in the Crocetta neighborhood in the Municipality of Cinisello Balsamo. KCity developed a project proposal taking into consideration the outcomes of meetings with the families of the disabled persons, and carried it out according to its accurate definition in a private abandoned building, where the cooperative bought the second and top floor in order to create five housing units. The living space will be organized in five autonomous, completely furnished dwellings, designed to accommodate up to sixteen persons. These five units are specially constructed for providing living autonomy and are targeted at disabled persons or people with limited earning capacity. The project is directed toward achieving the following goals: – provision of affordable housing solutions, thus maximizing accessibility to this type of offer for the most vulnerable social groups; – allowing persons with light or medium disabilities to experiment autonomy paths, thus gradually acquiring new personal skills; – building a living community that gives the opportunity to people with different profiles to get closer and create new forms of social cohesion. The project developed by KCity received funding of 450,000 euros by Fondazione Cariplo (call “Spreading and strengthening the temporary social housing” 2012).