For a city, to have a plan to transform vast metropolitan areas, presumes a will to have a future. It requires a meeting of minds on the urban planning and architectural decisions to be taken and a convergence of the economic and political variables that make up the complex scenario of any city. Fixing the architectural, development and entrepreneurial stakes and outlining the new urban fabric means having a clear idea of where the city is going. Milan has made those choices. The development guidelines to renew the city’s identity have been set. Its brand is being given a boost. Milan, the capital of design is by the same token the city of the new urban project: the Milan of the 2015 World Expo.
Great store is being set on overarching architectural projects as a means of triggering renewal. High-visibility architectures will embody and continue the dynamic, forward thinking character the city carved out for itself during most of the 20th century. In this regeneration project, modern architecture and rethinking of the attendant infrastructure are key to sustaining far reaching transformation, a means of carrying forward what has gone before. It is a means of amalgamating, replacing and integrating a medley of architectural cultures and taking them into the future. The opportunities provided by the revitalisation of the large industrial sites around the city that signalled Milan’s industrial development from the late 19th through 20th centuries have generated a wide range of solutions. They propose urban quarters that are no longer, however, just a medley of residential, tertiary and commercial functions but well-knit environments where the landscape is as much a part of the project as the architecture, and where energy efficiency combined with user comfort return as an essential part of what a building should provide. Making good the derelict areas of the city and turning them into programmes underpinned by new land use principles, new approaches to urban...
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