Institutional portal - Municipality of Milan

The Open Squares project was awarded in the "Networking" category

Milan, June 28 2021 – Open squares, the program of tactical urbanism interventions and collaboration agreements of the Municipality of Milan won the “PA Sustainable City” award in the “Networking” category. To date it has created 27 new social spaces, pedestrianising around 20.000 square meters of public space and installing 200 benches, 250 potted plants, 350 bicycle spaces, 50 tables of which 25 are ping-pong. The announcement of the victory came during the PA Forum week.

“This is a recognition of the teamwork of the departments of Participation, Public Works and Urban Planning - commented the councilors Marco Granelli (Mobility and Public Works), Lorenzo Lipparini (Participation, Active Citizenship and Open Data), Pierfrancesco Maran (Urban planning) - which involved many components of the Administration in a transversal way to give shape to one of the most concrete and impactful actions indicated by citizens in the Milan 2020 Adaptation Strategy document, which outlined the development of the city after the pandemic. The Open Squares have been able to establish themselves not only for the transformative force they have had on urban spaces but above all because they were born from the bottom, thanks to the reporting, co-planning and implementation contribution given by associations and committees who imagined them and who now preside over them and they make us live."

With Open Squares the Municipality of Milan has inaugurated a new way of conceiving interventions on individual areas of the city by combining two complementary aspects: the need to intervene on the territory and the desire of citizens to be part of the change - for the better - of their neighborhood. This is how the Piazze Aperte project was born and developed, created by AMAT in collaboration with Bloomberg Associates, National Association of City Transportation Official and Global Designing Cities Initiative.

Tactical urban planning is an innovative way of urban planning, based on interventions carried out in the short term and at low cost, to bring public space back to the center of the neighborhood and of the lives of the inhabitants. Among the objectives of the Open Squares program: rethinking the streets and squares of neighborhoods as places of social interaction, vitality and meeting, returning urban space to public life; increase the safety of citizens, pedestrians, cyclists through pedestrianization and traffic calming interventions, with particular attention to children, the elderly and people with disabilities; reconvert existing public spaces thanks to low-cost and high-participation urban furnishing and decoration interventions, before intervening with structural arrangements. And finally, encouraging active collaboration between citizens and the Public Administration, promoting the free initiative of citizens through the shared administration of common goods.