What Next for Mom and Dad's House?

Despite the increasing interest in reuse and circularity, little attention has been paid to the taskof transforming the extensive residential territories made up of single-family houses built in thesecond half of the twentieth century in many Western countries. Yet changing demographics,socio-economic transformations, shifts in housing preferences linked to the awareness of thecosts embedded in such models, and the attractiveness of the city as a productive space haveexposed the financial, material, and cultural crisis facing these settlements. In light of such trendsand given the sheer size of the phenomenon, retrofitting the single-family housing stock to makeit more consistent with socio-economic changes can be regarded as one of the most urgent,unresolved issues in architecture and urban design today. The book investigates the potentialsinherent in transforming of the single-family house in different geographical contexts by a groupof emerging and established scholars from the US, Europe, and Australia.Martino Tattara is an architect and associate professor of architectural design in the Departmentof Architecture at KU Leuven. Federico Zanfi is an architect and associate professor of urbanplanning and design at Politecnico di Milano