The New BreBeMi Highway. Character, Identity, Scenarios of a New Regional Conurbation

The BreBeMi highway project began in 1990: a highway connection to link the metropolitan system of Milan to the zones of productive activity of Bergamo and Brescia. The highway - construction began in 2009 - connects 3 of the largest cities of northern Italy, crossing 43 municipalities. Apart from the technical and constructive difficulties the main problem faced by the new infrastructure is its impact on the territory, on conurbation and on the habits of social life. The territorial context crossed by the highway is impacted by processes of transformation of the landscape and the environment, accompanied by consolidation of the settlement patterns that beyond the borders of the historical cities and their immediate suburbs have accelerated the process of widespread anthropization of the territory, especially in the vicinity of the branching infrastructural grids. The goal of this study is to identify and describe the character of each place (cities and landscapes) impacted by the highway, and to bring out the general identity of this territory seen as a whole. The connecting thread is a new street. By means of suitable categories of interpretation, the paper attempts to describe guidelines that can be of use for the comprehension of the landscape, crossed by the highway, while at the same time shedding light on opportunities on which to base future projects, trying to imagine a possible transformation of the infrastructure itself during the time, according to the growth of cities. The hypothesis of including such a vast territory in a single study is based on the premise that it is possible to consider the landscape - natural and constructed - through the same parameters, in order to orient individual new projects in a coherent way with respect to a more general idea of place. The project presented here calls for the subdivision of the space in variable intervals and measures, marked by the presence of repeating elements, thus producing the rhythm of the urban narrative. On this “platform” that subdivides the territory between Milan and Brescia a metric pace is thus generated. The highway becomes not an element that splits the territory, but a new opportunity. The work is organized on two different levels of analysis: a macro level, that focuses on all the territory crossed by the infrastructure and its areas of influence; a micro level that puts local identities into relation with the overall design of the territory.