ENVISIONING THE FUTURES

The recent history of the construction sector is characterised by three main phases of development: the first, at the beginning of the so-called green revolution, characterised by a prevailing focus on the environment at different scales with the definition of sustainability issues in their different nuances (adaptation, mitigation, resource protection, reduction and recycling, circularity); the second aimed at a renewed interest in people and their needs, even primary ones (safety and security, user-centred environments, comfort, well-being, health); the third, the current one, more focused on digitalization tools in various fields, from data acquisition (sensors, IOT, 3D scanning) to process automation (robotics, 3D printing, drones) to digital analysis and information (multi-dimensional BIM, virtual and augmented reality, digital twins, AI-based technologies).

This process, now almost 40 years old, has been supported and steered by the driving force of European programmes (to which national and local ones have referred over time, most recently the PNRR) that have attempted to establish a common coordination and joint revitalisation of the sector, including the recent initiatives like the Green Deal, Horizon Europe and Digital Europe, the New European Bauhaus, the Recovery and Resilience Facility and InvestEU, to name the main ones.

However, the construction sector, which represents an important part of our country’s and the EU’s economy, remains in a continuous crisis largely due to economic aspects that hinder its development (temporary building bonuses and tax incentives, limited public investment, low liquidity of enterprises, progressive poverty of households), to the difficulty of constantly updating the technological (including digital) and managerial skills of the actors in the construction process, both public and private, and finally to the apparent dichotomy between the needs of industry and those of users, which are difficult to schematise in formally rigid and often poor quality logics, even if economically advantageous. 

There is, therefore, a need to systemise the essential aspects of the construction sector, according to the three criteria of integration (of people, buildings, communities), circularity (economic and efficient use of resources) and simplicity (in planning, design, construction), in order to envision not a single, but multiple possible “futures” that intercept the horizons of the new generations and are able to interpret them with principles, processes, solutions, technologies and products also linked to digital transformation (in new constructions as for the existing heritage), addressed in a synergic and integrated way to the renewed needs of people and the quality of the indoor and outdoor environments.