City models - Modelos de ciudad - Stadtmodelle

The future of the cities. Traces Who can draw the traces of the possible futures of Italian cities? Perhaps no one. One can only examine the models of cities that the various municipalities say they intend to pursue when drafting urban plans. It is not considered to be useful to describe the interventions planned as a whole with a programme, rather a description will be given of a number of the important objectives behind the idea of the future city, or at least a model to refer to in the next decade. In this perspective, without having to specify the types of Plans, approval dates and designers, a number of outlines are given, that attempt to summarise the objectives on which the Plans examined are based, and are then outlined in what may be referred to as a “Manifesto” of the Plan, namely a concise summary of the Urban Plan, that to some extent communicates to a wide audience of laymen, the “essence” of the city that the plan intends to improve, or transform, or re-valorize, over a limited period of time, but sufficient to indicate “traces” of a probable path. A series of expressive paintings that could even be exhibited in cities, in the form of posters, in order to communicate to citizens and visitors, the image of a possible future, although it is very often “a city of dreams”. And so we discover that Milan has a complex, polyphonic, but also dangerously fragmented, identity. A concept of governance of the territory inspired by a model that tends to separate the indication of strategies and territorial development policies from regulatory systems and public planning of the form of the city and its service functions. The creation of the overall idea of the city whose scope is «an overall vision of Milan towards the future» is based on three fundamental guiding policies. The attractive city is intended as a rebalancing of functions between the centre and periphery, encouraging the modernization of the public and private mobility network with respect to the development of the city, according to a network logic: Milan metropolis as a network between the centre and periphery. The network city is an antithesis to the centre- periphery dichotomy. A form of Urban development consistent with the infrastructural system project is proposed; increased housing; incentives for creativity and propulsive services; protection of the identity of the district and monumental and landscape environments. The liveable and permeable city is intended as the construction and development of a permeable and continuous structure of open connecting spaces between the existing environmental systems and new large open urban parks, restoring the environmental function of rivers and canals and supporting, at an urban planning, building and logistics level, the European Union energy efficiency policy “20-20 by 2020”. The scope is to encourage the permeability of large environmental systems and connection with the new urban parks; efficient use of farming areas; the physical and functional renewal of contaminated or abandoned environments; enhancement of the important resource that is water as an indispensable environmental precondition for Milan; an innovative energy policy; strengthening of the green system at a local level and slow mobility based on public spaces and pedestrian and cycling paths, and providing incentives for private services of public interest through the principle of subsidiarity. The city of Milan, when interpreted with respect to the vast metropolitan area, superimposes transverse and tangential flows, typical of a complex, reticular and multi-centric urban structure, over its historically radial system. This should however be associated to a reform of the system of settlement rules, to give life to an project of urban “renaissance”. The “reticular” city to the East, structured on a rectangular mesh, the “stellar” City to the West, built on a diagonal network of roads and squares, the city to the South, built on the system of canals, that extend to the agricultural park and the city to the North, structured on the radials of the continuous conurbation of Northern Milan. Strategic projects assume the role of Epicentres, namely projects organized according to vocational criteria, designed in an “open manner”, that produce an “echo” effect of urban transformation in an extended urban area. The Epicentre is therefore the extended project area, within which the Areas of Transformation are identified, that are mainly characterized by public land, relationships and connections that may later trigger more extensive and complex projects in the interest of the city as a whole. The Plan identifies, together with existing plans or plans under development, ten new epicentres of development and rebalance, which are characterised by exceptional and highly accessible services. The system of the epicentre therefore offers the opportunity of creating widespread transformations in the districts (nuclei of local identity) and neighbouring areas, making the real estate market more dynamic and extensive. The task of the Public Administration is to guide the development of projects by private operators for the Areas of Transformation, that thus constitute the “driver” for the renewal of the entire urban fabric, the nodes. For Rome, Florence, Bologna, Genoa, Verona, Siena, Bergamo and many other cities the urban planning story is quite different.