Infrastructure and value capture in Italy and the challenge of Milano rail yards’ agreement

Internationally, policies use public/private partnerships for sharing the actual costs of re-urbanization (due to the fact that present processes prefer infilling, rather than traditional growth on greenfield) and for partially reinvesting the profits through local taxation and negotiated additional contributions in order to support more infrastructure costs, so to ensure sustainable and durable development. In Italy the planning discourse about the ‘fair exchange’ between public actors and private commercial developers in major urban transformation has been recently enriched of different issues. Some stem from principles of horizontal subsidiarity, others take charge of a new awareness on the finiteness of the land, others are concerned by an extended notion of ‘public interest’, no one can ignore the housing crisis on one hand and the serious financial municipal conditions on the other. Real estate today suffers from an excess in the supply of buildings (that results unsold), especially in the residential segment, but is still characterized by prices too high to enable affordable housing, at least in the large cities. A number of urban policies are oriented to reduce speculative and financial profits on land, to focus on the renovation of the existing stock and to invest firmly in networks, services and environmental goods, taking account of an increasingly urban population with differentiated needs and expectations in social welfare. Conflicts among public and private actors are often related to the amount of such obligations, but also to the viability and sustainability of urban densification in present contexts, as in the case of the reuse of seven rail yards in Milano. As a major urban transformation, it is aimed at developing a highly accessible, large and well distributed areas covering more than 120 ha, probably the most important and strategic areas in the metropolitan context. Its mixed use project lies in the political agenda since more than ten years: the current urban plan made conditional to a formal Agreement between Local and Regional Authority and the State Railways RFI, which was highly disputed during last local governmental elections and still is not in force. The new City Council intends to approve it in short time, though. The Agreement is focused on the exchange between the Municipality and the RFI, consisting in the attribution of building rights for residential uses (partially social and affordable housing), offices, retail and services and in the prescription of half of the total land for public parks, infrastructures and connections. Besides, RFI is obliged to convert part of the profits generated by the transformation in the strengthening of the metropolitan railway system and in the upgrading of local stations. Summing up, the Agreement includes both statutory N-NDO and NDO. NDO are partly required by the Municipal Plan and partly exceptionally introduced in the Agreement itself, as a value recapture practice. The political controversy concentrates on the size and features of such a recapture and related urban densities, additionally claiming a metropolitan structural vision.