Re-programming the Fast Changing City

Registering the complexity and the novelty of these phenomena, our School started the program “Re-Forming Milan”, a frame defined in accordance with the Council of Milan with the aim of gather the ateliers of architectural and urban design around some specific critical areas and sites of the city, looking for approaches and strategies which can dialogue with the real trends and processes. Used as a common platform for several activities, such as ordinary courses, seminars, master degree projects, workshops, “Re-Forming Milan” aims at the recognition of the value and potential of urban fabric and public spaces, through a descriptive approach in reading, decoding and contextually providing new opportunities, proposing projects at the different scales: interiors, architectural, urban design. For “Re-Forming Milan”, dismissed space and abandoned places, careless areas and brownfields, which use to be swamped places neglected by the official maps, become the paradigmatic examples of urban spaces which can be recovered with a new meaning, value and shape. These occupation, appropriation and activation actions often tend to draw, in the urban fabric, a minor geography capable of giving visibility and responses to the needs and forgotten desires of that part of the city which doesn’t participate at the shimmering Milanese Renaissance of the luxury apartments and multinational factories’ headquarters. Participants to the Miaw workshop are invited to identify spaces in Milan that either have an unexpressed potentiality either lost their characteristics, importance for the community and have been, for several reasons, marginalized and excluded from everyday life. From the smallest corner to the large areas on the city margins, the Workshop wishes to illustrate possible scenarios of re-forming, capable to revitalize these dormant places. In a 21st Century that is overwhelmed by image, information and dynamism, it is particularly important for architects and policy makers to recognize and assume the special role of the creative recovery of forgotten spaces. Adopting the vision and the technical guidelines of “Re-Forming Milan”, the Miaw workshops focused on some strategic sites located in the Eastern part of the city, facing very different urban conditions: deserted buildings in the densest urban environment, public spaces, industrial semi-abandoned settlements, brownfields.