Milan Potential City: Informality and Resilience in Times of Crisis

In recent years, Milan has confronted unique critical phenomena—excep-tional international events, like Expo 2015, and smaller and periodic ones, like Design Weeks—as well as continual migration from the Mediterranean and Syrian war. The city has experienced uncontrolled air pollution prompted by its geographic location, as well as the explosion of the COVID-19 pandemic without comparison in Europe. Nevertheless, Milan has grown, quite surprisingly and in unprecedented ways, to become bigger, greener, safer, and more equal. It has reacted to these events with a remarkable degree of resilience. In this regard, more than its new skyscrapers, Milan has garnered praise for its open spaces—not the monumental ones—but the unde-fined areas such as railway yards, crossroads, or neighborhood squares. Today, these spaces are working like lungs by allowing the city to expand and shrink according to different needs. They are accepting different uses, functions, and inhabitants to act much like thresholds between the public and the private, the ordinary and the excep-tional, and the city and nature. In so doing, these spaces have played an essential role in the urban growth and management of Milan that has largely gone unnoticed. This chapter offers a narrative “cartographic” reconstruction of an invisible urban system based on both human practices and the potential for architecture to accommodate a responsive, mobile, and expandable second city.