Milan’s Potential for a Structured and Interactive Rurality

ABSTRACT

A high proportion of Milan’s wider metropolitan area is agricultural land, made up of farms of varying sizes and in various states of usage. Some of this land is open fields surrounding islands of densely built-up urban fabric, some is comprised of pockets or branches of space embedded within dense city fabric. Many farms in this area are highly productive, whilst many others are regularly being abandoned. Elements of open land now relate almost randomly to the city within a sprawl that has grown from what was once a coherent network of villages and towns. Now they have become absorbed into complex concentrations of relationships and co-existences between different urban fabrics, morphologies, and porosities, each subject to different dynamics of expansion and contraction. Since Italy’s economic and social crisis of 2008, the growth of manufacturing in the area has been replaced by continued and possibly long-term shrinkage. In this situation, it is possible that a more coherent use of open land could play a key role in getting beyond the metropolitan area’s current fragile and fragmented pattern of economic individualism and self-referentially programmed plots and buildings, a pattern that appears unable to adapt to the radical changes taking place. This paper argues that a strategic, spatial, and thematic reconceptualization of Milan’s redundant open spaces and historic networks is a necessary step for the future planning and design of its urban territory.

Keywords:

• contemporary city
• rurality
• urban design
• Milan

Notes

1. In particular, I refer to the ideology of Smart Urbanism, which identifies with the answer to various kind of disasters the heart of the rural issue in our contemporary territories. This shifts the focus from the potentially profound implications of rural spaces' role in the shape and structure of the city itself.

2. Stefano Boeri, Arturo Lanzani, and Edoardo Marini, Il territorio che cambia. Ambienti, paesaggi e immagini della regione Milanese (Milan: Aim-Segesta, 1993); Massimo Cacciari, L’arcipelago (Milan: Adelphi, 1997).

3. Arnaldo Bagnasco, Tre Italie. La problematica territoriale dello sviluppo italiano (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1978).

4. Milan’s recent “Metropolitan City” status, which was intended to lead to innovative ways of understanding urban conurbations, is exactly shaped according to the borders of the old provinces, and has not amalgamated any region-wide urban configurations or environments. Indeed, such enlargements would be through voluntary affiliation requests only, and thus maintain intact the region’s power fragmentation.

5. Stefano Boeri, La città scritta (Macerata: Quodlibet, 2016).

6. There is a marked discrepancy between the quality of proposals, experiments, and researches in the Italian urban since the war until the 1990s and the concrete growing banalization of our urban spaces at all scales. This in spite of important contributions to the concept of urban design from a number of remarkable scholars and urbanists such as Ridolfi, Rogers, Samonà, De Carlo, Rossi, Quaroni, and the circle of Olivetti, just to name a few.

7. Bernardo Secchi, Prima Lezione di Urbanistica (Rome: Laterza, 2000).

8. Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 312: “when town planning seeks to improve the quality of life by making it more intimate, the planner’s very sense of humanity creates the very sterility he should seek to avoid.”

9. André Corboz, “Il territorio come palinsesto”; “Città territorio”; and “Ipercittà,” all in Ordine Sparso, ed. Paola Viganò (Milan: Franco Angeli, 1998); Paola Viganò, I territori dell’urbanistica (Rome: Officina, 2010).

10. Since 1950, cultivated land in Italy has decreased by thirty percent. Every year, 100,000 people lose the ability to eat local agriculture products. Each second, seven square meters of unbuilt land are covered in concrete. Almost forty percent of land in Lombardy has been “concretized” (ISPRA Report 2015).

11. Arturo Lanzani, Città territorio urbanistica tra crisi e contrazione (Milan: Franco Angeli, 2015).

12. “Green corruption” is the name given to the phenomenon of corruption related to environmental contracts, recycling of illicit funds etc. “Eco-mafia” are said to be behind at least sixty percent of ongoing urban or planned realizations in Lombardy, as detected by the National Anti-Corruption Authority (ANAC).

13. Viganò, I territori dell’urbanistica.

14. Carlo Cattaneo, Scritti su Milano e la Lombardia (Milan: Bur, 1999); Giuseppe De Finetti, Costruzione di una città (Milan: Etas Compass, 1969).

15. Fragmentation does not just disaggregate an urban-sprawl city, but the whole city, including the inner city. As stated by Aldo Bonomi, “From the Countryside to the Infinite City,” in Land Cover Changes in Lombardia over the Last 50 Years (Milan: Erasf, 2012), 36: “Milano is the place where the nature of the global hub of the city has demonstrated the maximum process of transformation to a service related industry in its productive fabric. […] In the outgoing transition of fordist industrialism, the city fragmented. And not in a banal sense; in reference to its urban geometry, and even more seriously, in reference to the multiplication of internal boundaries among the fragments of its own social composition.” See also Zigmunt Bauman, The Individualized Society (Cambridge: Polity, 2001).

16. Richard Ingersoll, “Eat the City,” Places Journal (June 2013): “Urban development during the past half century has eaten away the clear edges of cities, leaving ambiguous empty spaces. While the resulting disorderly appearance betrays the expectations of coherent urban morphology, I have come to realize that one must have compassion for such patchy areas. They are part of the lived experience of at least half of humanity and for this deserve attention as spots of potential quality. The essayist Philip Lopate, who, like myself, spent several years in academic exile in Houston, described that sprawling city as “a smiling face with a lot of teeth missing.”

17. Lombardy holds a record number of bio-gas production and processing activities; this has attracted worldwide financial interest resulting in a considerable increase in agricultural land prices and rents, leading to an ever-increasing expulsion of original landowners.

18. In 1990, Milan established Europe’s first agricultural park, “Parco Agricolo Sud,” 46,000 hectares involving sixty-three municipalities and more than 1400 farms. However, its existence is not known to the broader public due to the total lack of management policies going beyond the mere preservation and prevention from constant pressures to be built.

19. The “Study Centre for Inter-Milan Plan” was founded in 1961, giving rise to the PIM whose team was composed, among others, by G. De Carlo, L. B. Belgioioso, and B. Secchi.

20. Giancarlo De Carlo, La pianificazione urbanistica nell’area milanese (Venice: Marsilio, 1966).

21. Giancarlo De Carlo, “Abitare,” in Le ragioni dell’architettura (Milan: Electa, 2005), 32: “in order to produce more housing was sacrificed one of the fundamental tasks of architecture, which was to make of an environment a landscape. Previously, housing was conceived for landscapes, not as building blocks, empty and full. The pre-industrial city was a city designed as landscape summation.”

22. According to Secchi, this can be considered a long-lasting tendency; Bernardo Secchi, “For a Town Planning of Open Spaces,” Casabella, nos. 597–598 (1993): 5–9: “The plans produced by planners, dominated by movement and speed, forgot or took for granted all that referred to the idea of settlement. […] No attention is paid to the location or consequences of different open spaces, to their logic, to the possibility for a narrative urban space, to the profoundly ambiguous character of open space, to its capacity to be both disjunction and conjunction, separation and bounding.”

23. Secchi, Prima Lezione di Urbanistica; see also Bernardo Secchi, La città del XX secolo (Bari: Laterza, 2005).

24. Cattaneo, Scritti su Milano e la Lombardia.

25. Nan Ellin, Post Modern Urbanism (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1996). On the same subject, see also Giandomenico Amendola, Tra Dedalo e Icaro. La nuova domanda di città (Bari: Laterza, 2010). For a greater focus on issues related to design, see Fran Tonkiss, Cities by Design: The Social Life of Urban Form (Cambridge: Polity, 2013), 116: “Cities are crucial sites for the social production of nature. While the modern city has frequently been reviled for the urban ‘defacement of nature,’ contemporary critics are more likely to understand the city as an exemplary site of ‘socio-nature’ – the production and reproduction (including, at times, the despoliation) of the natural through social action and interaction.”

26. I refer to Casabella issues edited under Gregotti and Secchi’s direction, in particular double issues published every year in January–February that focused on specific contemporary city themes, e.g. nos. 597–598 titled “Open Spaces.”

27. Secchi, “For a Town Planning of Open Spaces,” 5: “But in [land] incessant re-writing something stays almost constant, changes very slowly, absorbs the rapid sequence of re-writing within; maybe, this is a sheet of paper onto which one has written the land, its markings, its layout, the system of open spaces […].”

28. Marco Voltini, Il progetto della modificazione. Spunti per il disegno del territorio contemporaneo (Ph.D. thesis dissertation). Politecnico di Milano, 2013, https://www.politesi.polimi.it/handle/10589/74923/.

29. Alexander Tzonis and Liane Lefaivre, Critical Regionalism: Architecture and Identity in a Globalized World (New York: Prestel, 2003).

30. An ISPRA Report, first quarter 2016 data, indicates pollution from pesticides in sixty-four percent of rivers, lakes, and creek surface waters in Italy. See ISPRA, "Rapporto Nazionale pesticidi nelle acque dati 2013-2014" [National Report of Pesticides in Water 2013-2014], in Rapporti ISPRA, 244/2016, Ministero dell'Ambiente. At another scale, see on the same subject Saskia Sassen, Deciphering the Global: Its Scales, Spaces and Subjects (New York: Routledge, 2007).

31. Ingersoll, “Eat the City.”

32. Gilles Clemént, Manifeste du Tiers-paysage (Montreuil: Sujet Objet, 2004).

33. Giancarlo De Carlo, Nelle città del mondo (Venice: Marsilio, 1985).

34. “Metrobosco” was conceived by Stefano Boeri in 2006 with the support of Milan province, but then abandoned by the council in 2009. “9 Parks for Milan” was proposed by a team lead by Pierluigi Nicolin in 1994. “Green River” by Stefano Boeri is a proposal currently under development.

35. Tzonis and Lefaivre, Critical Regionalism.

36. Marco Baccarelli, Manutenzione. Un progetto della città oltre la crisi (Ph.D. thesis dissertation). Politecnico di Milano, 2013, available online: https://www.politesi.polimi.it/handle/10589/74081/.

37. Serge Latouche, Farewell to Growth (Cambridge: Polity, 2009); Antonio Calafati, Economie in cerca di città (Rome: Donzelli, 2010).

38. William Neill and Hans Schlappa, “If Not Growth What Then? Re-thinking the Strategy Process for Shrinking Cities,” in Future Directions for the European Shrinking Cities (New York: Routledge, 2016), 180-190 (186), point out: “as long as the management of ‘crisis’ is perceived as separate and second best to the management of ‘growth’ the leaders of shrinking cities will struggle to rally the resources of their stakeholders to make their city a better place to live.”

39. Vittorio Gregotti, “Urban Open Spaces: The Phenomenology of a Design Problem,” Casabella, nos. 597–598 (1993), 4: “the new problem is on the one hand to identify the subtle difference between open space and public space, and on the other find a new meaning and function for the residual spaces which contemporary life has somehow discarded.”

40. Marit Rosol, “Public Participation in Post-Fordist Urban Green Space Governance: The Case of Community Gardens in Berlin,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research (New York: Wiley, 2010), 548–563; Eric Higgs, Nature by Design: People, Natural Process, and Ecological Restoration (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003); Ingo Kowarik and Stefan Körner, Wild Urban Woodlands: New Perspectives for Urban Forestry (Berlin: Springer, 2005).

41. Francesco Vescovi, “Parco Agricolo Sud ed EXPO: per una nuova governance dell’agricoltura periurbana milanese,” Territorio, no. 70 (2015): 92–100.

42. Richard Sennett, “Boundaries and Borders,” in Living in the Endless City, ed. Ricky Burdett and Deyan Sudjic (London: Phaidon, 2011), 324–331; Jan Gehl, Life Between Buildings. Using Public Space (Washington, D.C.: Island, 2006).

43. Sennett, “Boundaries and Borders,” 326: “The planning of the last century was hopeless at creating or promoting borderlands; when urbanists thought about the alternative to the sealed boundary, the dead edge, they could imagine only stripping away all distinctions, creating amorphous ‘open’ public space. They did not know how to bring edges to life by combining porosity and resistance.”

44. Alessandro Fea, “Ripensare lo spazio aperto periurbano. Scenari per il contesto milanese,” Territorio, no. 60 (2012): 81–84.

45. Beatrice De Carli, “Non Passive Ground. Refiguring the Residual Landscape: A Case in Milan,” Territorio, no. 60 (2012): 102–6.