In the two-year period 1946–47, during his brief but influential tenure as editor of Domus, Ernesto Nathan Rogers developed a reflection that would deeply shape the debate on architecture and postwar reconstruction. His editorial “A House for Each, a House for All“ stands as a foundational and remarkably timely text, in which the issue of dwelling and the concept of “home“ is structurally linked to that of the city and, more broadly, to the social and civic dimensions of architecture.

Rogers clearly asserts that the home cannot be reduced to the purely individual sphere: while it is the place of intimacy, it also becomes, in its aggregation, a generative principle of urban form. In almost biological terms, the house is thus the fundamental cell of the city‘s body. From this perspective, the problem of dwelling emerges as a collective issue, involving the relationship between individual and community and calling for a widespread responsibility in architectural design, particularly in relation to the evolution and socioeconomic changes of society.

The overcoming of the concept of “minimal housing,“ a legacy of research from the 1930s, marks the shift from a quantitative to a qualitative conception of dwelling, understood as a complex human experience. The house thus becomes both a right and a fundamental mechanism for building shared life. It is no coincidence that these positions found practical application in the INA-Casa program and in postwar public housing, where the issue of dwelling intertwined with that of work and, ultimately, with the material and moral reconstruction of the country.

From the final decades of the twentieth century – and unfortunately still today – this tension has weakened, and residential design tends to lose its social dimension, often reducing itself to an isolated building product.

In the face of profound transformations in family structures and lifestyles – from an aging population to the spread of single-person households, to the redefinition of relationships between domestic space and work – the issue of the home resurfaces with urgency.

The recent pandemic crisis has further highlighted the inadequacy of housing models based on reduced space and the functional separation of the city. A reconfiguration of dwelling is therefore required, one that integrates private and shared spaces, introducing mechanisms capable of accommodating emerging practices – from home working to co-housing – thus restoring a relational function to the home.

At the same time, the rigid separation of functions, resulting from the harmful concepts of zoning and the monofunctionalization of parts of the city, has generated forced mobility, fragmentation, and phenomena of social ghettoization incompatible with contemporary life. As Jane Jacobs – author of “The Death and Life of Great American Cities“ – already observed, urban vitality depends on the mixing of uses and people. Similarly, social segregation – whether produced by exclusive or marginal housing – undermines the quality of urban space.

Rethinking the home therefore means rethinking the city as a complex, inclusive, and multicultural system, founded on functional, social, and generational mixing. From this perspective, reinvigorating the debate on dwelling implies recovering the foundational elements of the discussion that had animated postwar architectural culture, restoring centrality to design as a critical tool capable of connecting the form of space with the form of society. Even today, the city begins with the home.