Relations Design Spaces

According to many urbanists, public spaces could be generated by a prior and unitary order, result of a planned design. The scarcity of public spaces forces architects and urbanists to look deeply at what the environment provides. Requalification is the way to act, the new therapy of spaces, focused on connecting and linking more than building. Through the case study of Villoresi Canal the paper want to explain how new networks of relations generate new spaces for the community. The north of Milan is characterized by its presence, often forgotten, a canal that links Ticino river to Adda river developing itself for 86 km. The canal, sited where, after Milan-city, we have the most populous and urbanized territory of the entire region -in this part of the region we can find a density of 4.000 pop./km2 instead of 415 pop./km2, the regional average- is the opportunity, the resource, that all the cities in the north should exploit designing a new greenway, an ecological corridor. In this scarcity of free land and public spaces, where all the cities are increasing, the Regione Lombardia in 2001 started to give indications and rules to cities in order to preserve the landscape that is disappearing with time. Every water course, natural or man made, is considered a common heritage, according to the regional decree, and so is the Villoresi canal, water infrastructure built originally in the countryside with the only purpose of irrigation. Nowadays, the cities moved forward, surrounding the canal without it becoming a feature of the city-life. The 2001 law gives to the canal 10 meters on each side of free unbuilt space and promotes in an area of 200 meters roughly, green connections, pedestrian and cycle paths, ecological corridors... Thanks to these new attitudes the canal will become the more important thread of the net that can link all the cities in the north of Milan: a network of relations that can generate new public spaces.