Milan: Productions, Spatial Patterns and Urban Change

Productions, Spatial Patterns and Urban Change

Simonetta Armondi, Stefano Di Vita, Simonetta Armondi, Stefano Di Vita

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138244795
• eBook ISBN: 9781351979115
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

As a main urban centre of one of the most dynamic European regions, Milan is a key location from which to study narratives of innovations and contemporary productions – old and new manufacturing, tertiary and consumptive sectors, creative and cultural economy – and investigate their influence both on spatial patterns and urban policy agenda.

Accordingly, this book explores the contentious geographies of innovation, productions and working spaces, both empirically and theoretically in a city that, since the beginning of the 2000s, has been involved in a process of urban change, with relevant spatial and socio-economic effects, within an increasingly turbulent world economy. Through this analysis, the book provides an insight into the complexity of contemporary urban phenomena beyond a traditional metropolitan lens, highlighting issues such as rescaling, urban decentralization and recentralization, extensive urban transformation and shrinkage and molecular urban regeneration.

This book is a valuable resource for academics, researchers and scholars focusing on Urban Studies such as Urban Policy, Urban Planning, Urban Geography, Urban Economy and Urban Sociology.

1 Which Milan?

Setting the scene for reflecting urban decline, resilience, and change

Simonetta Armondi and Stefano Di Vita

Introduction

As already mentioned in the Introduction, there are several reasons the spatial focus of this manuscript – first aimed at understanding the role played by new productive activities and workplaces in the urban change processes and, therefore, in urban planning and policy activities – is the Milan urban region (paying specific attention to its densest urban core). For instance, on the one hand, the innovative spatial and socio-economic dynamics promoted in one of the main and most meaningful spatial and productive platform in Europe within a longstanding world economic crisis. On the other, the opposite tensions and impulses – such as decentralization and recentralization projects; intensive and extensive urban transformations; urban shrinkage and regeneration processes; city of consumption and production’s development models – which are changing the traditional perception of the urban space. From the centrifugal socio-spatial dynamics of the dense urban core, to the centripetal socio-spatial dynamics of the wider urban region,¹ also within the perspective of a future strengthening of the new Milan Metropolitan City authority.² Therefore, this first chapter aims at “setting the scene” in order to define and represent the spatial, socio-economic, and political context, which all the other chapters refer to, as well as through the contribution of maps elaborated by the Centro Studi PIM, which are included in a dedicated section following this first contribution by the manuscript editors.

Spatial pattern, economic geography, and urban governance

Milan is an interesting case study because of the specificities of its spatial and socio-economic dynamics and its public policies, which make this city and its urban region able to represent the complexity of current world urban phenomena. In fact, Milan – “land in the middle”, following its etymological root Mediolanum – is currently the functional-economic capital of a wider city-region that extends to the entire Northern Italy macro-region,³ with more than 23 million inhabitants (Figure 1.2). If we consider Northern Italy as a global city-region (Perulli and Pichierri, 2010), it would be counted up among the first places (Scott, 2001). Milan (and its administrative region, Lombardy) is also part of a wider supranational network of European economic engines, including Stuttgart (and the federated State of Baden-Wurttemberg, in Germany), Lyon (and the administrative region of Rhone-Alpes, in France), and Barcelona (and the autonomous community of Catalonia, in Spain) (Figure 1.1). The macro-regional, national, and European connections of the city are even stronger, with infrastructural corridors (motorways, railways, and high-speed railways) linking Milan to:

• at the macro-regional and national level, Bologna-Florence-Rome-Naples, Genoa, Turin, and Venice-Padua-Treviso, (Figure 1.2);
• at the international level, the main European urban nodes, being the city located along the European corridor 5 (Seville-Kiev), and close to the European corridors 1 (Berlin-Palermo, crossing the corridor 5 in Verona, west of Milan) and 24 (Genoa-Rotterdam, crossing the corridor 5 in Novara, east of Milan) (Figure 1.1), all under development.

After the Fordist de-industrialization phase, which took place in the 1970s and 1980s, with the proliferation of vacant industrial areas (Figure 1.6), the city has displayed a significant degree of adaptability, with a persisting diversity of economic sectors and with a noteworthy quota of manufacturing industry (Figure 1.4), in particular in the urban region, outside the urban core (OECD, 2006; Balducci, Fedeli and Pasqui, 2011). These two phenomena combined have contributed to boost the resilience of the urban region and to limit job loss process. In the years between the 1990s and the explosion of the economic crisis in 2008, the city has maintained a trend of growth, especially in comparison with other former industrial cities in Italy and in Western countries. Nevertheless, this growth had been more sustained before 2000 (around 3 per cent), but weaker afterwards, between 2000 and the first sign of economic turbulence in 2007⁴ (Cucca and Ranci, 2017).

Within this dynamic and resilient context, Milan shows a contradiction between a vital economic base, on the one hand, and a low policy and vision, on the other. In fact, also according to the complexity of public and private actors, the governance of Milan is grounded on a series of loosely coupled institutionalized experiments in the metropolitan area (Gualini, 2003). That is, for instance, from the Milan Intermunicipal Plan designed by Giancarlo De Carlo in 1963–1965, to the Strategic Project “Città di Città”, approved by the former Milan Province in 2006 (Balducci, Fedeli and Pasqui, 2011). As a consequence, Milan has confirmed its reputation as a “polyarchic city” (Dente, Bobbio and Spada, 2005), not linked to just a unique centre of power, in which the governance coalition, the interplay of actors, and the interests in the urban making and remaking have always been complex, multi-layered, and multi-faceted (Perulli, 2016).

Milan is a case of centre without centralization (Perulli, 2014); a radial model whose expansions had origins following the railways infrastructures, mainly towards the North of the city.⁵ Accordingly, industries grew in Sesto San Giovanni and in the Brianza area, close to the main city, as well as in nearby cities located further away, such as Bergamo and Brescia. This process was gradual. For instance, firms such as Breda and Pirelli opened their first factories in the surroundings of the Milan railway stations, but at the beginning of the twentieth century, they moved to Sesto San Giovanni in order to exploit larger spaces and workforce.⁶

After, in particular, the Second World War, the city and its urban region affirmed themselves as the main driving area of the economic and demographic boom of the whole country,⁷ mainly based on a diversified system of manufacturing activities. Whilst the industrial and residential growth of the Milan municipal area and the northern (highly urbanized) sector of its urban region was impressive (Figure 1.4 and Figure 1.5), no wider scale planning tools or visions were officially approved to orient and manage this mainly spontaneous process. The effects of the lack of planning tools and visions at the urban region scale are visible in the chaotic, disordered, and poor development of the city and its surroundings. This phase of economic and demographic growth of both the Milan municipality and its metropolitan area concluded in the 1970s, when a new phenomenon of production and residential relocation from the main city to the neighbouring municipalities and the external areas of the urban region started (together with a global relocation of economic activities).

As in other European metropolises, at the beginning of the 1980s a new phase started, leading to a service sector metamorphosis and a real estate development of the city (before the 2008 global crisis), and to the current reorganization and innovation of its urban change process (during and beyond the recent economic downturn). This process – that spread from the urban core to the surrounding areas – contributed to substituting both former large industrial plants and small manufacturing buildings with new urban functions and activities (Figure 1.6 and Figure 1.7). Nevertheless, until now, it has been developed without the support of a broad and shared vision (Morandi, 2007), and it still demands for a planning system and a strategic approach able to face to the regional size of spatial and socio-economic dynamics of the city. Consequently, even though the limits and weaknesses of this process the Milan city centre (directly connected to other global cities) has been consolidating as a sort of Italian main epicentre for the current metamorphosis towards a knowledge and creative economy and society. On the contrary, this change has not yet involved the entire urban region, which is still formed by areas affected by “poor metropolitanization” (Centro Studi PIM, 2016). Accordingly, there are several potentialities for the new Milan Metropolitan City to deal with a contentious metropolitanization phenomenon, at the same time made by excellences and poorness, even though effective contributions by this new local authority have been weak until now.⁸

While the Metropolitan Strategic Plan – approved by the new Milan Metropolitan City in 2016 – represents a first proposal for the development of a broad and shared scenario from an innovative perspective, outside of the Milan municipality, this tool had already been anticipated by still “milanocentric” visions. From the “Documento Direttore del Progetto Passante” to the “Documento di Inquadramento Ricostruire la Grande Milano”, approved by the Milan City Council in 1984 and in 2000 respectively. According to these plans, the priority axis for the development of the entire urban region corresponded to the new suburban railway tunnel within the Milan municipal area, which was gradually opened starting in 1997 (Bolocan Goldstein and Bonfantini, 2007; Morandi, 2007). Running from the north-west of the city to the south-east, this new infrastructure enabled the activatation of a new suburban train network that integrated the already existing regional train by contributing to re-directing the urban change process of the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Introduction
• 1 Which Milan? Setting the scene for reflecting urban decline, resilience, and change
• 2 Urban regionalization and metropolitan resurgence: discontinuity and persistence of a spatial dialectic
• 3 The attractiveness of Milan and the spatial patterns of international firms
• 4 Creative production and urban regeneration in Milan
• 5 Sharing economy: makerspaces, co-working spaces, hybrid workplaces, and new social practices
• 6 Forms of urban change: nodes of knowledge-based networks as drivers of new metropolitan patterns in Southern Milan
• 7 Urban change and geographies of production in North-East Milan
• 8 Urban change and innovation of functions and productions in the north-western transect of the Milan urban region
• 9 Territorial infrastructures and new production places
• 10 The last cycle of Milan urban policies and the prospects for a new urban agenda
• Index