Conference Program

Shrinking, ageing and with fewer and fewer young people: this is how Italy looks today. The decline in the student population and the downsizing of the school network raise questions about the future of school buildings, especially in small municipalities and fragile areas. The redevelopment of existing schools is becoming strategic: not only as a functional, energy and regulatory upgrade, but also as an opportunity to rethink schools as civic infrastructure and public spaces. Innovative and inclusive teaching practices require a rethinking of learning spaces, while the building, accommodating functions other than school ones, is transformed into a place for the community, ensuring its survival, especially in peripheral contexts.

The contribution – the result of the 2017 PRIN PRO.S.A. Schools to live in. New architectural models for the construction, renovation and resilient restoration of school buildings and for building the future in Italy research project – focuses on small schools in peripheral areas. Although at risk of closure, they continue to play an active role, becoming privileged laboratories for new models of educational space and integration between architecture, pedagogy and the community.

Through spatial analysis, the research reveals the architectural potential of schools as authentic “community architectures”, open to new educational and civic uses, and investigates their role as territorial hubs capable of activating participation, inclusion and social innovation.

The focus is on both internal and external spaces: entrance halls serving as welcoming spaces, corridors that can be transformed into informal learning areas, classrooms that open out onto the outdoors, and open spaces – courtyards, gardens and surrounding areas – as key elements in ensuring the school’s flexibility and openness to the local community. Their configuration, permeability and relationship with public space become design levers for accommodating new civic, cultural and educational functions – laboratories, fab labs, environmental centres, health centres – promoting interaction between schools and communities and strengthening the role of schools as multifunctional hubs for the local area.

By collecting and organising a substantial number of case studies in a thematic atlas, the research, using observation points at different scales and starting from the assumption that the existing situation is a possible terrain for even unexpected projects, shows how the typological variety of small schools offers real opportunities to experiment with new pedagogical and architectural approaches.

Permeability, flexibility and territorial integration become fundamental tools. Opening, welcoming, transforming: the school becomes an educational and civic hub, where learning is community and the community itself becomes school.