SMART COMMUNAL SPACE (Palermo, 2026)

Smart working is a professional practice which has been especially re-evaluated in 2020, during the lock-down caused by the spread of Covid-19. However, not everyone had access to some basic standards for being focused and productive, : many smart-workers, indeed, were forced to use their personal bedroom as a working environment and to join meetings with their children’s screams in the background, as their apartments could not offer the required privacy and space. Considered that after the 2020 quarantine, many companies started extending the smart-working for their employees’, seen the positive results on their productivity, the Italian government started changing its course to satisfy the needs of the citizens. SMART COMMUNAL SPACE is a proposal made by the urban research collective “CityMaybe” which had been welcomed and punctually tested by the government since 2026. The project proposed to empty the last floors of some selected partially used apartment blocks to reconvert them into a communal space for a shared smart-working. The Italian law on Urban Standards DM 1444/68, which established the minimum public surface required for each inhabitant, was updated with the obligation to have at least one SMART COMMUNAL SPACE every ten city blocks. The first test was launched with the buildings of the Borgo Ulivia in Palermo, a social-housing district designed in 1956 with INA-casa: at that time the buildings were mainly inhabited by young couples who came back to Palermo for living but able to work remotely with their companies In Rome, Cagliari, Firenze and Milan.