Institutional portal - Municipality of Milan

Lipparini: “A project that affects a particularly fragile part of the city to improve the quality of living”

Milan, September 30 2019 - After via Abbiati, it is the turn of via Gigante: tactical urban planning interventions aimed at making especially the less central areas of Milan more beautiful and more liveable return to the San Siro public housing district. With the intervention of hundreds of citizens, active since the early morning, today the sidewalk of Via Gigante in front of the Off Campus space, managed by the Polytechnic of Milan, has changed its face, turning yellow, red and white, and the green has begun to relive, awaiting the arrival, in a few days, of a bench and some racks.
 
An intervention that continues the similar one, concluded last spring in the adjacent Via Abbiati, designed to design a redeveloped route that ideally accompanies citizens from the entrance of the Aler housing district to the headquarters of the neighborhood laboratory in Piazza Selinunte, passing in front at Off Campus, the space managed by the Polytechnic in via Gigante. The institutional entities present in the neighbourhood, the Municipality, Aler and the Polytechnic, have been monitoring it for some time through dynamic interaction, with the activation of a series of interventions aimed at its revitalization and paying attention to the inhabitants and their needs. 
 
The framework for the operation is the collaboration agreement publicly signed today between the Municipality, the DAStU (Department of Architecture and Urban Studies) of the Polytechnic of Milan and a large group of associations, such as Mapping San Siro, San Siro neighborhood laboratory, Alfabeti onlus , Tuttinsieme Cooperativa sociale, Comunità Progetto Cooperativa sociale, Genera onlus, Fare Insieme, Il Telaio delle Arti, Legambici, Legambiente for cycling, Mums at School, Sheb Sheb, Zuccheribelli onlus and the Intercultura commission of the Cadorna Institute.
 
"The collaboration agreements, made possible by the approval of the Regulation of Common Goods, which allow citizens and the Administration to join forces for the redevelopment of public spaces, buildings or green areas and the implementation of activities that improve the quality of life in the neighbourhoods, are multiplying – declares the councilor for Participation, Active Citizenship and Open Data Lorenzo Lipparini -. It is a form of advanced volunteering for the care of common goods, which allows us to administer in an open and participatory way and activate civic energies thanks to informal and simplified procedures. In this case, we are particularly satisfied with a project that involves a particularly fragile neighborhood and which has, among others, the objective of promoting the care of public and domestic space aimed at improving of the quality of living and relationships between inhabitants".
 
"This operation - explains Andrea Di Franco, professor of the Polytechnic and responsible for the project - must be a starting point, the driving force for a redevelopment of the neighborhood which sees its inhabitants as protagonists. Our objective is to start an intervention to care for the territory which those who experience it are then responsible for directly. It is also essential that it is not an isolated episode, but is part of a broader plan, capable of identifying a coordinated and homogeneous network of spaces: for this reason we have developed the West road project (Wrp), the Western Road Project financed by the Polisocial Award 2017, which concerns the western area of ​​the city, the one centered on the axis of via Novara which intercepts many fragile neighborhoods and large public spaces, the parks of Trenno and the Caves, as well as the Forest in the city".
 
The intervention, as specified in the Collaboration Pact document, involves the placement of some parking deterrents at the intersection between via Abbiati and via Gigante to discourage illegal parking in pedestrian areas; the arrangement of the greenery of the parterre under the trees currently used improperly as a car park; the creation of a wooden platform in front of the new Off Campus headquarters to support activities in the public space; the position of two bicycle racks (on the road taking up a parking space or integrated with the platform); the coloring of the sidewalk in continuity with via Abbiati up to the space in front of the neighborhood laboratory; the position of a rack and a bench on the pavement near the neighborhood laboratory. The furnishings under the trees, where you can sit, are donated by the Vestre group.
To complete the redevelopment project of the context, an agreement is envisaged with Aler for a street art intervention on the facade.