Abitare la crisi nei territori intermedi. Scarsità di risorse e pratiche di adattamento a Milano / Inhabiting the crisis in intermediate territories. Poorness of resources and adapting practices in Milan.

The paper focuses on the identification of signs in the transformation of living practices caused by the global economic crisis, and it takes the “territori intermedi" of Milan as privileged area of investigation. From a regional scale, “territori intermedi” (t.i.) are exchange and meeting places among different urban populations and multiple living, usage and mobility practices. They can be seen, in fact, as “liminal spaces” (Berger, 2006) of the city-region (Soja, 2011), places where flows and dynamics concentrate and intersect each other, at the bounder between the consolidated city and the municipalities around Milan belt. These territories are characterized by a particular condition of living: besides its structural territorial characteristics, there are contingent processing factors associated to the current situation of the global economic crisis. The structural conditions (and pre-crisis), which determine the essentially fragmentary and heterogeneous nature of t.i. concern: the presence of urban materials that follow their own location logics, not compatible with the compact city because of their scale and function (shopping, tertiary and research centers, logistics hubs, “junk spaces”, etc.); the concentration of social groups or types of people expelled from the consolidated city or people that did not find there a space tailored to their needs; the lack of an integrated mobility system. Dealing with these characteristics, the paper is divided into three main areas of research: “Residential enclaves” (exclusion and segregation), “Redevelopment” (new "relational spaces" and communities of practice), and “Mobility”. The research specifically highlights two aspects: t.i. as "hinge" and exchange areas between different practices and social groups, and t.i. as areas with adaptive capacity of people and institutions to the effects of the crisis and with respect to the increasing scarcity of resources. In order to develop a direct observation of the territory and the people who live it, different survey instruments have been used: literature and cartographic analysis, and the construction of surveys and semi-structured interviews with different actors. Large potentials, previously neglected, are shown by these territories, such as: the availability of unused space, and of productive farmland, the existence of not congested residential areas, sustainable mobility practices, solidarity and cooperation networks, a particularly active tertiary sector. These are the resources that citizens and institutions are profiting in order to develop tactics and strategies as responses to the economic crisis. In this context, some strategies to respond to the crises emerge, such as the reuse of abandoned buildings and spaces, the redevelopment of portions of land for peri-urban agriculture, policies and actions of mobility, hybridization and contamination between housing practices. In fact, in some of the case studies analyzed, it can be clearly found the relationship between resource scarcity and consequent adaptation mechanisms by local communities and institutions. A final consideration coming from the potential, the resources and the questions emerged in this research, brings to an integrated scenario that interpret these territories as “city of proximity”.