Towards a workable space

In recent years, the environmental and economic crisis – unexpected to younger generations –, the wartime destructions, and the consequently growing number of migrants shifted the attention of architects and scholars from formal issues towards more concrete ones. This depressing context can offer them the opportunity to reaffirm their social role, interpreting questions and proposing solutions through the implementation of their own specific tools. With regards to this condition, an apparently traditional topic as ‘workspaces’, in this regard, offer a clear and well-defined research field. The spaces dedicated to work are in fact undergoing a process of spontaneous rearrangement and seem to show a potential to improve depressed urban areas through the support of minimum resources and through a review of both tools and motivations for this specific field of design. Workspaces are naturally rooted into territories and communities, and play a decisive role in determining the conditions of density and physical proximity. In fact they seem to embody some of the most relevant contemporary urban questions, urging architects to focus on basic design tasks, namely suggesting and establishing spatial and human relations.