Legacoop Abitanti is a national association of housing cooperatives based in Rome, at Via G.A. Guattani 9, where it shares offices with the sector’s financial company Finabita. It represents the part of the Italian cooperative movement that builds and manages homes rather than selling them on the open market.
Founded in 1961 as the National Association of Housing Cooperatives within the wider Legacoop federation, it today organises and represents housing cooperatives belonging to Legacoop across Italy. Over time, this network has helped produce a substantial share of the country’s cooperative housing stock: studies linked to Legacoop Abitanti report 322,000 dwellings built by its member coops, of which about 52,000 are rental units and 270,000 for ownership, with roughly 40,000 homes in undivided cooperative ownership.
From the 1990s onward, the association explicitly shifted from a narrow focus on “housing” to a broader idea of “inhabitants,” tying access to homes to questions of urban quality, environmental performance and social inclusion. It promotes research on housing needs – for instance the “Next Housing” study on economic, housing and social fragility – and develops tools for members, such as support for energy-efficiency renovation and access to Italian incentive schemes.
Legacoop Abitanti has also worked on “social management” in social housing, running national workshops with universities and foundations to define how cooperatives can manage buildings, services and communities, including new collaborative living projects and regeneration schemes in cities such as Milan, Bologna, Florence and Rome.