Il co-living come motore di innovazioni sociali nei “Sassi” di Matera = The co-living experience as engine for social innovations in the "Sassi" complex in Matera

The severe economic framework of the last years gradually eroded the buying power of the families and in particular made more difficult to buy or rent an apartment, also due to myopic housing policies which favour the builders and their profits instead of answer to needs and necessities of population. Besides this there is also a lack of design sensibility from the ones who design and build houses: they base their operational strategy on statistic and beliefs which date back to the 80s and fix the traditional family unit of father, mother and two/three children as the standard one. On the last years there’s a new trend: peoples from various class origins and occupations are setting up teams with the aim of doing community actions for fighting the economic crisis, for example purchasing groups, ecovillages, cohousing and coworking, useful to hold down the costs but also to arrange social innovation models. The aim of this paper is to introduce two operative experiences which, starting from a social innovation process, set up shared working and living places and allow the fruition and maintenance of spaces located on the “Sassi” complex in Matera, which represent a sort of forerunner model of cohousing. The first experience is ‘UnMonastery’ where “unmonks”, drawing inspiration from the monastic life, work and live together in the stately mansion of Palazzo del Casale and each one, with different background, has the mission to answer the social needs of the Matera community and to encourage radical forms of social innovation and collaboration. The second experience is ‘Casa Netural’ placed in a house close to the characteristic setting of the Duomo of Matera. It represents an experimental initiative which supplies various services to the community, for example the co-living: a week of cohousing with other social innovators during which is possible to meet the neighbours, set up pilot projects or experimentations, visit Matera and its surroundings.