Increasing the livability of existing buildings, regularizing small building irregularities and making the real estate market more fluid: these are the central issues of the housing policies that, between the State and the Regions, in recent years are redesigning the face of the Italian building heritage.
In Sardinia, the comparison between two key instruments – the Piano Casa and the new Salva Casa – reveals two distinct, but partly complementary, visions of urban development and management of the existing.
On the one hand, a ten-year regulatory framework, made up of exemptions and incentives, created to respond to housing needs and stimulate building redevelopment. On the other, a very recent national decree that intervenes on the micro-irregularities widespread in the built environment, simplifying procedures and facilitating access to the market.
The context is clear: 80% of the Sardinian (and Italian) building heritage was built before the 1990s, often in the absence of updated criteria on safety, sustainability and formal documentation . Yet, every intervention on the existing clashes with a stratified bureaucracy and a fragmented regulatory framework, where national and regional rules often overlap or contradict each other. The common goal is only one: to transform the built from ballast to resource.
Born in 2008 with the decree law 112, the House Plan had a precise objective: to promote the expansion and redevelopment of the existing building stock, even in derogation of the urban planning tools, to respond to the growing housing need. In Sardinia the first application came in 2009 with the regional law 4, which introduced extraordinary provisions for the redevelopment of the existing building stock through adaptation, expansion and recovery interventions also providing for a series of volumetric incentives (up to 30% more increased in some cases by a further 30%) linked to the energy requalification of the buildings.
It is the season of extensions and continuous adjustments. Regional laws 8 of 2015, 1 of 2017 and finally 1 of 2021 attempt to rationalize the framework, introducing more detailed rules on the recovery of attics, basements, ground floors and even removable structures for tourist use. But it is also the season of appeals: the Constitutional Court intervenes several times, limiting the scope of the exemptions and redrawing the boundaries of what is permitted.
