Alessandro Bianchi

Poli della regione urbana milanese verso l’Expo 2015

‘Centres’ of the Milanese urban region in the light of Expo 2015 - Can we today use symbolism to govern a city whose localities can no longer be distinguished? The city has become polycentric and needs symbols to make its decentred landmarks recognisable once again. Zoning was completed some time ago (at least on paper, and certainly not in the minds of local and national administrators), but it is still not altogether clear what is meant by upgrading of the run-down suburbs. Are these notions that await concretisation in laws from which quality architecture will then flow? Or, rather, should the plan go back to being informed primarily by a design which has yet to be regulated by law? These days it seems like community services are redesigning the city in the likeness of a printed circuit board. Indeed, development of the entire area is fuelled by responses to demands for better transport, communications, goods, housing, jobs and leisure facilities, or at least this is how it appears to those who believe in this contemporary paradigm. However, men and women do not identify with public services. They simply use them. Let us therefore avoid the temptation to turn a means into an end.