Urban hybrid open spaces; a new vision for soil use in Milan

Milan in less than 10 years has doubled its pedestrian areas. The policies that the public administration is adopting are increasingly heading towards a city that transforms and regenerates around its public space. Public interventions in the existing heritage alternate with private ones in the transformation areas, designing an increasingly integrated system of collective spaces that contribute to raise urban quality and respond to contemporary demands. In Milan, in contrast with most of the other large Italian cities, a great deal is being invested in public mobility in a sustainable way, changing the way we move and redesigning old and new collective places to accommodate pedestrian, cycle and shared mobility. In many cases it is a real coming back to the historic city of its public spaces, in others is a creation of new places, suited to the uses that contemporaneity requires in terms of accessibility, security, social inclusion and sustainability. The milanese case shows a synergy, in some cases an alternation, between the public and private action that in recent years have pushed the city grow in the same direction. The article intends to address the theme of the design of the milanese pedestrian public space by reading a series of case studies that can show the different design approaches divided into interventions in the consolidated city and in those in the transformation areas. The first cases are almost referable to the public intervention, from the pedestrianization of via Paolo Sarpi to that of the Darsena and the Navigli, to the most recent tactical urban planning actions; in the transformation areas it is instead the private subject that promotes and manages the collective space thus increasing the overall value of the interventions and restoring to the city areas of high urban and environmental quality as in the interventions of Porta Nuova, Portello, CityLife and Symbiosis. The rebirth of Milan’s open spaces, for a more livable, human-friendly, more sustainable and more inclusive city, passes through dynamics that are typical of the local culture. While on the one hand there are few forms of spontaneous re-appropriation of spaces, on the other, the participated action of citizens together with public and private subjects is at the center of the dynamics of redefining the surface of the city.