Does a ‘Milan Model’ Exist? Notes on Italy’s Most Dynamic City

Over the last twenty years, Milan has become the protagonist of an ‘urban renaissance’ in terms of demographic increase, investment attractiveness and transformation capacity. The season of negotiated urban planning, which began on an experimental basis in the first half of the 1990s to tackle the post-Fordist transition, now seems to have fully matured into a depowering of the traditional tools (the general regulatory plan) in favour of more agile tools that would make it possible to seize the various opportunities offered by transformation areas, legacy of the industrial past. These different modes of regulation, together with a stubborn urban marketing-oriented narrative and a good use of a great event (Expo2015), have indeed attracted international investors and new inhabitants, to the point of making Milan an exceptional case. This phenomenon is considered by many as unique in Italy, to such an extent as to suggest the existence of a ‘Milan model’. Starting from the description of this phenomenon, this article questions the replicability of the processes that have redesigned the Lombard capital and the (modest) role of urban planning in the city’s revival