Institutional portal - Municipality of Milan

Urban census of 1946 carried out in view of the drafting of the new Town Plan (PRG) adopted in 1948 and approved in 1953.

At the end of the Second World War, Milan was a city partially destroyed by bombing. In the aftermath of the Liberation, the municipal council installed by the CLN decided to gather the best professional figures to design a new master plan, to which it was entrusted at the same time with the role of guide and symbol of reconstruction.

An entire generation of Milanese architects and engineers responded to the call: 160 took part in the competition of ideas for the new plan announced at the end of 1945 and then in the sessions of the conference which discussed the proposals received. Among them, after the free elections of 7 April 1946, the members of the eight planning commissions (so-called neighborhood commissions), of the nine consultative commissions and of the central commission for the new PRG, coordinated by the urban planning councilor Mario Venanzi.

Faced with the vastness of the destruction, it was first necessary to realize how the city had changed, made unrecognizable by the destruction: for three months the members of the planning commissions traveled throughout it, recording data and information on each building, thus carrying out the urban census 1946.

The census is made up of three thousand cards, one for each urban block, each accompanied by a map with annotations, symbols, backgrounds and a table in which a coded series of information relating to the property surveyed is shown by house number. An imposing and detailed representation of a large wounded body, onto which architects and engineers projected their idea of ​​the city and planned its development: the "Venanzi plan", adopted in 1948 and approved, after a revision, in 1953.

Just over seventy years after the drafting of the urban census, the forms, now preserved in the Citadel of the Archives of the Municipality of Milan, were scanned and were then studied by a research group from the Polytechnic of Milan.

The results of the study are collected in the book “Milano 1946. At the origins of reconstruction” edited by Gianfranco Pertot and Roberta Ramella, published by Silvana Editoriale (Cinisello Balsamo, 2016).

The volume is dedicated to the census, the story of the master plan and the interventions on the city in the delicate post-war period, includes the lists of buildings destroyed or damaged by bombing and an atlas of 121 tables obtained by collating the maps of the cards.