A detailed overview will be provided of the key characteristics of the short-term rental sector (from its prevalence to its economic performance, from its geographical distribution to the profiles of those managing the listings), illustrating how it has evolved over the years and outlining the situation in various Italian cities. Against the backdrop of the findings from the research, a discussion will take place on the main regulatory approaches in Italy and Europe, exploring their limitations, potential, constraints and effects.

Admission is free. You will be able to follow the conference online via a link that will be posted on this page.

Contact: full@polito.it

On this page, you can find further information about the research underpinning the conference, and you can download the reports containing the data as they become available.

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Post-Office Turn investigates how work digitalization is reshaping the urban and architectural landscapes of Milan and Turin. The research combines urban-scale analysis with building-scale observation to understand the transformative potential of the ordinary office stock. It integrates mapping, morphological study, policy analysis, and design-based inquiry to explore how existing buildings can “learn” to become residential or hybrid spaces in response to structural shifts in work patterns. By framing adaptive reuse as both an environmental necessity and an opportunity for low-carbon urban regeneration, the project aims to contribute to contemporary debates on the future of cities and the sustainable reactivation of their built legacies.

Aims and Objectives

This research focuses on the adaptive reuse of ordinary buildings, with particular attention to office stock as a key site of transition in cities undergoing economic, social, and environmental transformation. Vacancy, obsolescence, and changing work practices make office buildings a crucial testing ground for contemporary reuse strategies.
The project investigates emptiness as both a physical condition (vacant surfaces, underperforming structures) and a systemic condition (changes in labour, policies, governance, and markets). It examines how reuse practices unfold across different scales and how design, policy, and environmental knowledge interact in shaping new transformation pathways.

Objectives:

• Detect and analyze spatial patterns of vacancy in office building stocks in Italy, with a specific focus on Turin and Milan.
• Document reuse and conversion practices, identifying technical, social, economic, and regulatory drivers in a comparative perspective.
• Connect architectural transformation with urban governance, planning frameworks, and collaborative design processes.
• Assess the environmental, social, and economic implications of reuse, with particular attention to embodied carbon, material cycles, and lifecycle performance.

Methods

The project employs a multilayered comparative framework, integrating different forms of knowledge production and representation:

• Urban data analysis to detect vacancy patterns and characterize office stocks at multiple scales.
• GIS mapping to visualize spatial distributions, morphological structures, and transformation potentials.
• On-site fieldwork to document architectural conditions, ongoing interventions, and local practices.
• Comparative architectural redrawing, focusing on typology, depth, façade systems, circulation, and spatial adaptability.
• Historical and policy research linking macro-urban narratives with building-scale transformations.
• Environmental and energy analysis, assessing embodied carbon and lifecycle implications.
• Design-based inquiry to explore adaptive reuse strategies and prototype transformation scenarios.

The methodology builds upon the Manhattan pilot study developed for the 14th São Paulo Biennale (2024–2025), which tested mapping protocols, analytical tools, and documentation methods. The Italian study will:

1. Test the transferability of these tools to metropolitan regions characterized by different governance structures, building stocks, and regulatory conditions.
2. Challenge and refine the methodology, producing a context-sensitive framework adaptable to diverse urban legacies.

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Within this framework, the student housing sector must be highlighted as a crucial aspect, especially for its implications and challenges to social sustainability. Firstly, students’ struggles to access adequate and affordable housing have an impact on students’ living and personal conditions. Secondly, the struggle for housing is mirrored by the conflicts and demands of the most deprived part of the local population, especially in cities and neighbourhoods where there is a shortage of housing supply and an increasing demand for non-permanent uses (e.g. tourism). Third, the combination of real estate and urban dynamics has favoured the transformation of student housing into financial assets.

The student population in Italy is about 1,793,000, while the student housing system offers only 42,732 places (MUR). While the PNRR aims to increase supply, the dynamics induced by the growing presence of students and related investments are putting the welfare of students and residents at stake. The transformations of Italian university towns can only be framed in part in the existing town & gown literature. New perspectives from Southern Europe, which locate urban changes in the reciprocal relationship between university, students and city, constitute an important advancement of knowledge in the debate, raising attention to a vital issue for most European cities.

Ongoing research

The strand of research on the complex relationship between university and city began in 2020 with the H2020 SMARTDEST project, in which part of the activities made it possible to analyse the forms of social exclusion connected to university student mobility in some areas of the city of Turin; among the outputs was the publication of the Quaderno FULL “Torino da fuori”. Subsequently, this strand is developed within FULL through the implementation of two complementary projects running in parallel over the two-year period between the academic years 2023/2024 and 2025/2026. Both projects follow a multidisciplinary approach and involve research teams with members from inside and outside FULL, with expertise in the areas of urban planning and urban studies, geography and sociology.

OSA

The two-year project OSA – Ossevatorio Student* and Abitare, which started in July 2023, funded by the DIST department and in which FULL is an operating partner and member of the coordination committee. Other strategic partners of the project are the City of Turin and IRES Piemonte (Institute of Economic and Social Research).

OSA aims to set up an observatory on the characteristics of the university student population and its relationship with the city of Turin, in particular with regard to the housing issue relating to the non-local component (students away from home). It is a necessary tool to know the consistency and characteristics of this population, such as the contexts of origin, where they live in Turin and the interactions with public and private actors, with the third sector and the territorial transformation strategies implemented by the administrations concerned.

The observatory has the following practical objectives

• Building a database on the student population, particularly off-site, with attention to composition (origin, age, gender…) and location on the territory;
• Investigation of key issues relating to the right to study: heterogeneous composition of needs, access to services and housing, trends in housing supply and demand, forms of discrimination, especially for foreign students or students from at-risk backgrounds, forms of social and civic mobilisation;
• Coordination of active players in the university and student system, with a view to concerted decision-making processes;
• Compilation and publication of data and analyses to support decision-making processes and initiatives (1) within the public administration, (2) within organisations providing services to students and promoting the right to education, and (3) amongst the student population itself.

The OSA project and observatory page can be found here.

LINUS

The two-year project ‘LINUS – Living the university city. Student housing as drivers of changes’, which started in November 2023, is one of the PRIN 2022 PNRR projects funded by the Ministry of University and Research and of which the Turin unit, coordinated by Loris Servillo, is Principal Investigator. The other Research Units involved belong to the State University of Milan Bicocca, the University of Bologna and the University of Padua.

The research project LINUS – LIviNg the UniverSity city, addresses the dynamics of student housing as a driver of urban change and as a challenge to sustainability in cities, where university attraction policies and the related growth of the student population in the city stress the wider housing supply. The project belongs to the Emerging Topic of the Call “human well-being”, in Cluster 2, and develops its research agenda in topic 6, for which social sustainability and its drivers are at stake. The LINUS research agenda investigates the student housing dynamics (SHD) in four cities (Bologna, Milan, Padua, Turin) characterised by the increasing presence of students, and by the difficulties in finding adequate housing conditions for both students and residents, due to the shortage or competition of supply, which are reaching critical levels.

Under Theme 6, therefore, the LINUS research question is about understanding how the role of universities and their attractiveness to non-resident students generate SHDs that are (a) drivers of urban change, (b) disruptive factors in the wider housing sector and (c) causes of exclusionary processes, which undermine urban social sustainability. Consequently, it examines how universities should operate in a socially responsible manner regarding SHDs and promote social inclusion for all citizens, whether they are part of a permanent or mobile population.

The objectives of the research are:

• To fill the knowledge gap on students’ housing conditions, careers and trajectories.
• Unravel the structure and dynamics of SH provision (including changes in the actors involved and the influence of local, regional and national policies).
• Understand the interrelation between SHD and the general dynamics of the housing market.
• Extend the project results, reflections and analytical model to city contexts and neighbourhoods affected by similar disruptive urban changes.

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The project was developed in collaboration with the City Council’s Department for Urban Care, Public Green Areas and Riverbanks of the City of Turin and the collaboration between Palazzo Madama and key national partners, who have always been committed to environmental conservation and protection, primarily the Po River Basin Authority (ABDPO) and the Interregional Agency for the Po River (A.I.Po) together with the Po Biosphere Reserves, now united in the UNESCO MaB Po Grande Reserve. Alongside them are Turin-based interpreters, from the Polytechnic University of Turin to the University of Turin and the European Research Institute, who carry out daily research and study of the Po and water in general from different disciplinary perspectives, with the media partnership of Rai Radio3.

Addressing the essential issues of climate change in an exhibition that weaves together a visual narrative developed entirely through the interaction between large-scale painting and photography, illustration, and infographics capable of narrating the Italian landscape in all its complexity and articulation, from the Alps to the sea, the exhibition project focuses on the theme of water and in particular on our Great River, which for millennia has determined the landscape and the life of the population, is a means of communication but also an essential support for agricultural and industrial activities, and explores the consequences and analyzes the potential solutions implemented in the area by the various research and protection agencies of the Po.

652 kilometers long, 141 tributaries, almost 87,000 square kilometers of river basin, 19,850,000 inhabitants, 37% of Italian agricultural production, 55% of the national livestock industry: the Po and the Po Valley, where 40% of the national GDP is produced, constitute one of the areas with the highest concentration of population, industry, and commercial activity in Europe.

This incredible development has been made possible thanks to the historic stability and abundance of Italy’s largest river, which is fed by countless sources and diverse natural processes—mountain springs, snowmelt, glaciers, large lakes, and plains springs—but which have undergone significant change in recent decades, leading to a crisis that is occurring everywhere on a global scale.

Precisely because of its unique characteristics and its wealth of history, historical stratification, and landscapes, the Po—Roman and pagan, Byzantine and Lombard, feudal and ruled by lords, countryside and cities, romantic, agricultural, industrial, touristic, and cinematic—is capable of symbolically and clearly conveying the climate crisis and its effects: the face of the planet is changing more rapidly than it has done in the last millennia, and the role that humans have played in this process has now been proven.

The Change! exhibition aims to describe these changes, offering opportunities to reflect on the crisis and possible scenarios for adapting to it, but also to urge action and awareness: it is time to act.

Change!, curated by Tiziana Caserta, Anna La Ferla, and Giovanni C.F. Villa, is accompanied by a catalog published by Silvana Editoriale, with contributions from scholars at the University of Turin, the University of Bergamo, the Polytechnic University of Turin, the Polytechnic University of Milan, ENEA, Slow Food, Adaptation.it, and Mondoserie.it, among others.

Change! Ieri, oggi, domani. Il Po. (Milano: Silvana Editoriale, 2024), ISBN 978-88-3665-882-4: 170-179, catalog of the exhibition Change! held at Palazzo Madama, Turin.

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The first phase of work, developed by FULL, consists of the activities of territorial diagnosis and analysis, preparatory to the elaboration of a design vision and aimed at highlighting criticalities, distinctive elements and design opportunities offered by the context.

The Parco dell’Arrivore is a site that eludes univocal judgement and needs to be read at different scales, in its dual role as a green lung in the northern Turin suburbs but also as a node in a wider network of river parks. The overlapping of agricultural, then industrial and mining activities, up to more recent occasional uses, often improper or illicit, has left a palimpsest of signs and legacies that contribute to characterise its complexity. Despite its criticalities, the Arrivore shows great ecological and landscape potential, due to its strategic position and the variety of atmospheres it offers. The main project directions identified include enhancing the park’s identity, improving accessibility, and environmental redevelopment through the experimental application of Nature-Based Solutions, with the aim of promoting sustainable regeneration and the gradual transformation of the site.

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You can download the full report (in Italian) from this page.

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NB – the file available for download from this page is an extract. To obtain a free copy of the complete file (160MB), please write to full@polito.it.

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Retail businesses compete in an oligopolistic market providing specific goods or services to consumers at observable market prices. Retailers decide how similar their product may be with respect to competitors and decide their best location. Location in the retail sector is meant to be more than just a geographic position. It is the relative position that a retailer can occupy given the proximity to other stores, and to potential consumers. It is an evaluation of social, economic, and even morphological aspects of urban life, such as centrality and accessibility, layout and design, visibility and popularity, cluster attraction, and spill-over. Hence, commercial city patterns are the result of a long process in which retailers deal with urban morphology, given that space is a scarce resource to be allocated with competitors.

The main objective of the research is to investigate the position of retailers in the municipality of Turin and the drivers that influence this fundamental decision process. The work is focused on the real estate and urban flow of people to indagate how these factors impact the commercial city pattern.

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This is the place where Christine of France chose to build her royal residence in the 17th century, enlarging and transforming a river villa overlooking the Po. It is also where the International Exhibitions of the late 19th and early 20th centuries were held, as well as the Valentino Grand Prix motor races. Today, the park, which is the centre of gravity of the Po river system, is an important place for the people of Turin, both because it is enjoyed by many on a daily basis and because it contains tangible evidence of its history that is still visible to this day. Some examples include the Castello del Valentino and the Borgo Medievale, but also architectural structures with a more recent history, such as Torino Esposizioni.

As part of the Next Generation EU funding, the Italian Ministry of Culture has identified the enhancement of Parco del Valentino as one of the 14 cultural attractions located in Italy to be rehabilitated through ad hoc funding and planning. Of the €1,460 billion programmed for the 14 strategic sites, the funding set aside for enhancing Parco del Valentino is €103 million.

The aim of the master plan is to enable the City of Turin to identify the most effective spending strategy aimed at maximising the effect of investments related to the expected structural funds in order to produce positive socio-economic impacts and lasting domino effects.

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