Living in Barriera Vecchia in Trieste. Experimenting with affordable and unconventional policy models at the neighbourhood scale, between housing and services.

The development of housing policies tailored to the increasingly diverse needs of a wide range of people – whose working, personal, and health conditions change over the course of their lives – cannot be separated from a careful and in-depth understanding of the contexts in which these policies are implemented. A strongly situated knowledge of the area under investigation is, in fact, the foundation for identifying the network – either existing or to be developed – of resources, services, and facilities supporting housing strategies (Frausin & Novak 2025). In this sense, the involvement of stakeholders from the early phases of analysis and subsequently in the design process is crucial (Lanzani 2024). This paper retraces the process of stakeholder engagement and co-design carried out in Trieste, one of the three pilot cities involved in the research project From Unconventional Households to Unconventional Housing (UAH!). The project aims to develop field research and experimentation to explore possible innovative solutions for affordable living. Through the use of various tools – desk analysis, in-depth interviews, dialogue with key stakeholders, roundtable discussions, and focus groups – it was possible, on the one hand, to reconstruct the landscape of urban housing policies and local experiments, and on the other, to identify a pilot area in which to collaboratively explore new shared trajectories with a group of local actors. The rich and multifaceted picture that emerged guided the identification of themes and locations for envisioning housing policies and design explorations aimed at testing new ways of living. These were developed in close dialogue with the urban context and supported by the educational activities of the European network of design studios involved in the UAH! research project.