The COVID-19 pandemic has profoundly affected the relationship between people’s behaviors and residential spaces, bringing to public and academic attention, on the one hand, the exacerbation of pre-existing problems and, on the other, the potential of spaces, such as communal gardens and apartment-block terraces, to become important resources of sociability or privacy. Overall, this raises the question of how to assess the responsiveness of the existing residential stock to needs that transcend the traditional concept of housing adequacy—e.g., the need for adaptable, open, and livable spaces. This research moves from the assumption that underused spaces in residential neighborhoods represent a crucial asset for creating new economic and social values through architectural and urban projects. Consequently, moving from an in-depth observation of a selection of public housing buildings in Turin as a paradigmatic case study, the aim is to explore the potential for the adaptive reuse of residential spaces at different scales—from the apartment to the neighborhoods—highlighting the implications for design. In doing so, the paper puts forward a methodological approach, which widens the way housing adequacy is normally assessed, by focusing on the possibility of transformation of often neglected spatial resources.

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Institutional buildings act as if they were designed specifically to prevent change for the organisation inside and to convey timeless reliability to everyone outside. When forced to change anyway, as they always are, they do so with expensive reluctance and all possible delay."

The assessment criteria and indicators used in the authorisation processes of building or urban projects can play a key role in achieving the goals introduced by the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Yet, on the one hand, the evaluation of project proposals and the granting of building permits still rely to a large extent on the subjective judgement of public technicians, severely limiting the incentive for the development of virtuous practices and innovative procedures; on the other hand, the measurement of the SDGs on a local basis presents strong operational gaps and criticalities, struggling to clearly orientate urban transformation processes. In the paper, these problematic issues represent the starting point to discuss the possibilities that the development of a GeoBIM platform could open to spatialise, measure and automate authorisation processes by integrating local regulations and sustainability indicators of global significance. The methodological and technical implications of the proposal are explored both through a reconstruction of the disciplinary literature on the subject and through the detailed description of some recent experimental tools. In particular, by questioning how to operationalize the integration of local assessment methods and global indicators through a GeoBIM platform, the paper raises broader questions on the relationship between measurement, policies and planning practices. In particular, the revision of priority criteria according to the 2030 Agenda goals is read in the text as a useful opportunity to rethink a number of administrative tools and practices. Indeed, the development of a GeoBIM platform to support building permit applications could not only make the assessment of compliance with local regulations more efficient and automated but also allow for the measurement of project impacts against indicators aimed at the local declination of the sustainability goals defined by the 2030 Agenda.

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