Regenerating a Metropolitan Periphery: Geographies, Experiences and Goals from Città Metropolitana di Milano

In Italy, a recent institutional reform imposed to the Città Metropolitana (Metropolitan Authority) the role as driver for shared territorial strategies and as engine for urban regeneration. According to EU policies, the regeneration of existing city should focus on peripheries intended as areas, marked by a lack of accessibility, services’ provision and attractiveness. Therefore, this approach involves several spaces within metropolitan patterns, belonging both to central urban cores and to surrounding municipalities that can be used as answers to current urban challenges (new forms of poverty or exclusion; alternative lifestyles; emergent conflicts among generations or populations; the dramatic homologation of urban spaces and the banalization of their landscapes; and many other issues related to sustainability and land consumption in larger and larger territories). Moreover, in EU rhetoric, regenerative actions should follow the example of well-recognized good practices, often devloped in preminent locations, taking advantage of peculiar opportunities or recieving extraordinary fundings. But current processes, especially when developed in marginal municipalities, count with less human and financial resources, less appealing for investments and key stakeholders and, often, a sort of indolence of local authorities due to their peripheral status. My contribution aims to reflect about current practices of urban regeneration, using the Città Metropolitana di Milano as a testing ground, pointing out the spatial distribution of ongoing interventions, the involved stakeholders and recurring processes.The proposed overview underlines risks and opportunities of an experimental approach, based on a program/framework (Rigenerazione urbana e Welfare Metropolitano) where (i) the Metropolitan scale became the connector between EU, national and local levels and where (ii) CM supports peripheral municipalities in their proposals. In this light, the metropolitan space is intended as an open network of opportunities in which civil servant – supported by planners - experiment a new approach to the issue of urban regeneration.