There is a metaphor that often comes up in conversations between those who plan spaces and those who plan organizations and it concerns stone. Stone as a symbol of permanence, power and confine. A business as a fortress: high walls, a moat and a drawbridge raised at dawn. The city as an external setting, a backdrop, a geographic context in which the business is positioned, without truly belonging. An entity that occupies land consumes infrastructure and pays taxes, and yet, essentially, remains elsewhere. This model is a thing of the past. Its end was not due to an economic crisis or a technological revolution, but something more subtle and more radical: a shift in the very concept of value. What does a business produce? For whom? With whom? These questions, which seemed rhetorical or marginal two decades ago, have become the core of every strategy with any hope of success in the decade that we are currently in.

There is a concept that Ezio Manzini – perhaps the most influential Italian theorist in the field of social innovation, honorary professor at the Politecnico di Milano and founder of the international network DESIS – has set as the focus of decades of research: that of proximity as a generative resource. Not proximity in the sense of physical closeness, but rather in terms of relations, reciprocal trust. Capacity for collaboration and a shared sense of place. An energy that is only released when diverse contexts come together, and when businesses stop being enclaves and start contributing to a fabric. This humus serves as fertile ground for talent to blossom.

However, in order for this to happen, businesses need to stop being impenetrable places. They need porosity. They need that form of lightness that does not entail absence of structure, but that allows air, light and relationships to pass. It is the difference that Italo Calvino identified as the first of his Six memos for the next millennium, lightness not as an absence of weight, but as a change in the way that weight itself is perceived. A light business is not a weak business; rather, it has understood that rigidity is a risk, not protection. Milan is the most interesting laboratory in Europe for observing this transformation. It is the city in which the tension between the two models – the fortress and the sponge, the cement and the fabric – is most visible, most dramatic and most charged with cultural implications. Milan is a city that has reinvented itself over the past two decades through a series of bold gambles: Expo 2015, the Vertical Forest, the district of Porta Nuova and the redevelopment of the railway stations. In each case, the underlying question was always the same: who inhabits this space? Who benefits?

The risk that Milan has run and that in part continues to run is that of mistaking attraction for inclusion. A city that attracts capital is not necessarily a city that is growing in a healthy manner. The question of tax residences for billionaires has generated an important yet often poorly framed debate. The problem is not whether the rich should be paying more taxes, but rather what the presence of non-native fortunes brings in terms of cultural and productive ecosystems. A billionaire who transfers their residence to Milan for tax purposes brings luxury consumption, increases the pressure on the real estate market and spends their time in private clubs. They rarely bring knowledge or create fertile relations with the community, and they seldom invest in that network of connections that transforms a city from a stage into a living organism. This is where the second form of attraction comes into play, concerning large professional services organizations. Firms such as EY, which have not simply set up shop in Milan, but that have chosen instead to put down roots. The distinction is fundamental, as is the “carbon pact” often cited by the CEO of EY Italia, Stefania Boschetti. EY’s presence in Milan is no mere representative office. It is a professional community of many thousands of people, carbon chains, as it were, with a presence that embraces generations of graduates from Milan and beyond, and that has, over time, built a profound relationship with the university system, with institutions and with the world of enterprise culture. This type of presence produces something that no flat tax can acquire: it creates stratified human capital, a network of multisector relationships and a culture of work that permeates and modifies the city. An alliance between carbon networks. 

There is a stark difference – one that attractiveness ratings struggle to measure – between a city that plays host to wealth and one that trains and holds onto talent. The first is a showcase. The second is an ecosystem. In terms of the new relationship between enterprise and the city, permeability is not just a case of physical space. It also concerns cultural and professional porosity. The war over talent is not won with salaries alone. Success comes through the quality of the context. This is why the theme of enterprise as an urban subject is not one of social business responsibility, nor of philanthropy. It is pure strategy: a company that contributes to rendering  its home city more habitable, more open and richer with opportunity is effectively investing in its own reservoir of future talent. It is cultivating the terrain on which it will continue to develop.

Opening image: In Piuarch’s rendering, the bird’s-eye view of the complex reveals the interplay of solid and void volumes and the pathways connecting the building to the city. Courtesy of Piuarch