Nature and legal framework of the Privately Managed Public Spaces: opportunity or risk for a just city? The case of Milan

Public space’s role in urban quality is widely known: it defines the city’s structure, provides material support for community life, and represents civic and religious powers and values. The mechanisms of public space production are manifold: they can be either the result of an urban plan realized by the public entity on public areas, or the result of more complex urban projects promoted by private actors, in compliance with the national laws and policies. Public space has assumed an even more crucial role in urban transformation processes in Western cities that no longer expand, but regenerate under increasingly frequent conditions of scarce - spatial and economic - resources. Public space is not only the share to be reserved to the public entity to guarantee the urbanization charges due, but it has become an asset that gives value to investments and projects. Privately Owned Public Spaces (POPS) are a typology of spaces consolidated in the Anglo-Saxon environment and tradition (Kayden, 2000). Similarly, what we call Privately Managed Public Spaces (PMPS) are also spreading in other countries where public space was traditionally owned (or sold for public use) and managed by the public, multiplying the ways in which private actors conduct the management dimension (Carmona et al. 2008). How this management is done and its implications and effects are still to be investigated. The paper intends to discuss the first outcomes of ongoing research conducted by an interdisciplinary group of urban studies and administrative law scholars on Privately Managed Public Space in Italy, specifically in Milan. Milan is an interesting case study for several reasons: it is a city in which the real estate market has been quite active in the last few years, carrying out several interventions that have also involved the realization of spaces for public use; there have been several experimentations of public-private agreements of various kinds with different actors and subjects (from the third sector to associations to developers); public space has been placed at the center of the urban strategies of the last urban plan, both at the urban and neighborhood scale.