In former times, the public residential sector was interested by the most important experimentations on housing issues. Today, it can still be considered a research field for new forms of urban sustainable development and housing challenges. The increasingly recurrent use of architectural competitions, together with the openness towards a wider range of users in the European social housing program, determined the establishment of solutions capable of answering to the current needs and of adapting to change. New research lines, starting from the analysis of the social transformations, propose a reinterpretation of the residential space responding to the present needs and anticipating the future ones. This approach contrasts with the traditional one, incapable of interpreting the contemporary social complexity. According to this approach, the building, once subject to rapid obsolescence, could become a long lasting good, accompanying the evolution of the desires and the lifestyles of the inhabitants throughout the time. The adaptable building can be considered a valuable answer to the request for a house that accompanies the evolution of the inhabitants. This intent can be achieved through different strategies, referring to the dwelling scale or involving the housing complex as a whole. An architecture open to adaptability, able to anticipate and accommodate the desires and the needs of its occupants, is at the base of the new challenge for a sustainable growth.
