Urbanism, in practice. A planning experience on public space and urban regeneration in Milan

Abstract

The paper reflects on ordinary urban planning practices and governance of public spaces starting from an experience carried out by the Authors as consultants for one of the 9 Municipalities of the City of Milan. The two authors have coordinated between January 2013 and January 2014 the drafting of a document called “Studio d’Area StAR” (Area Study South of Romana Railway Area), which focused attention on a large urban context undergoing transformation in the south-eastern area of the Municipality of Milan. The Area Study focused on the challenges and problems of the urban design of open and relational spaces, within the framework of a strategy to plan and govern widespread regeneration, over the medium and long term.
The paper describes the context, the actors and the implementation process of the preparation of the Area Study, in the more general framework of the planning policies undertaken in the Municipality of Milan in recent years. Secondly, the paper investigates the forms of widespread regeneration underway within the project and describes the investigation strategies and forms of design exploration carried out for the preparation of the area study.
Problems and challenges of this urban planning initiatives will be studied with a particular attention to the fragility of planning and urban design tools for public spaces with respect to the economic processes of urban transformation.
In conclusion, starting from the description of a concrete case, the paper aims to offer a theoretical reflection on the concrete practices of urban planning today and on the need for innovative intermediate tools, in a context of reduction of the skills, resources and powers of public actors and the prevalence of fragmentation and privatization of urban regeneration choices such as that of Milan.