X Milano Cesare, Macchi Cassia, Martina Orsini, Nicolò Privileggio, Marialessandra Secchi Hoepli, Milano 2004 (pp. 176, € 24,00)
Milan’s expansion to the north is overwhelmed by a scarcely planned or controllable vitalism. At the crossroads between industrial and post-industrial society, it is a crucial territory from an economic and political point of view. Not by chance, in the last ten years it has been among the more investigated, and often called upon to support arguments on the entire country’s present urban condition. The authors of X Milano describe Milan as a “unique city” in terms of its highly homogeneous use and mix of integrated functions, the generalised urban effect and its inhabitants’ sense of belonging.
What makes it a city, so to speak, is a difference in degree between things, in long-term processes, as some re-readings of Cattaneo and De Finetti bear witness. The demanding theory put forward by this study is that a critical exercise aimed at redefining Milan’s urban structure is today necessary. It is a planning picture capable of dealing with the finely scattered city, representing an alternative to the processes and at the same time the mirror in which local society can recognise itself. This organisational principle moves first with the territory and its social economy before values.
The proposed picture is of a horizontal transversality marking a discarding (but not a denial) of the mono-centric city. This transversality is constructed upon new geographies designed by the large continental transport axes (corridor 5), infrastructural groups and, on a different scale, a frame of minor roads, railways, trams, vegetation and open spaces. To the reader this picture seems more like a way of indicating an explanatory perspective, one possibility among others, than the revelation of how things are. One might suppose there are other perspectives in the high density of North Milan, from the obsessively repetitive way in which the settlements mention technology, the market and production. We therefore have to search for the proposed representation’s meaning in the utility it offers, not in the specificity.
This is argued showing how territorial lines of modification can derive from it, starting from the four environments marking the transversality: the Busto-Gallarate-Legnano junction, the Saronnese, lower Brianza and the wide basin between Lambro and Adda. The strategies carried out in the four areas redefine a sort of planning principle in areas of dispersion. They regard themes such as infrastructural concentration-rarefaction, the articulation of minor networks in everyday inhabited spaces, the construction of ordinary collective space, the relations between density and new landscapes or rather the strategies of densification, the use of mixité and landscape stratification. Connecting with these is another last and specific theme defined by the attention to the large transversal axes.
This way of proceeding leads to an interesting project behaviour for the attempt to escape the dichotomy more commonly marking approaches towards dispersion. It is concretised between attention to the large environmental or infrastructural related spaces and behaviours confined to the close and minute construction of habitable space. This is done without in the meantime withdrawing into the mere assessment of disorder and indifference, as products of a kind of ethical and civilised arbitrariness. There are a couple of not irrelevant questions that remain open beyond this point, which represents the commendable attempt to put in order a now wide series of project methods. The first could claim to be denied individualism. The characters of a new social landscape are much insisted upon: a society of individuals who find their common spaces outside a conscious project, each on their own, without seeing themselves in a collective project or even in a common destiny.
In contrast to this now customary image of local, finely scattered and fragmented society is an image of the territory very fixed in the idea that it is capable of generating a critical awareness in individual actions, a shared point of escape. The passage is not clear: how can North Milan appear like a continuous magma within which an invisible system of differences operates? How can it be a terrain of conflict between processes limiting variety and processes that contribute to increasing it, and at the same time be a field of an orderly reading of space? On one hand it is a half-followed exaggerated subjectivity between continuity and discontinuity, the obstinate highlighted by the distinctiveness.
On the other hand it consists of junctions, relations, environments and situations. Social plans and morphological plans appear divergent and marked by an ambiguity that is good to consider non-reducible, even in the legitimate search for some consistency, possibly guided by Aldo Rossi’s ambitious comments on the necessity to pursue a form that “carries reality forward”. But this remains solely a point of escape. The desire to overcome contradictory individualistic urges within a form is different to the operation of giving form to contradiction and conflict. The point is left suspended with a margin of misinterpretation. The second question could claim to be undervalued centrality. Taking care of external territories was important.
Weakening the links with the centre seemed fertile for new interpretations. But today everybody sees how the centre is once again the object of new economic and symbolic enhancement, according to age-old and not always virtuous political methods. This is seen particularly in Milan where architecture (preferably foreign and of high media value), far from being absent as the text sustains, is playing a precise role: that of the litmus paper of large real estate operations. With respect to similar transformations in the Seventies, there were plenty of cognitive, limited and insufficient apparatus that were open to criticism, but they were an expression of the will to react to the new problems.
With respect to the present transformations, we do not have adequate interpretative instruments. We fix our gaze elsewhere, as if the finely scattered territory were the only metaphor of a hypermodernity that crosses over us and of which the urban centre is only an opaque margin.
Cristina Bianchetti Professor of Urbanistic at the Turin Polytechnic