Milan has long regarded itself as the world capital of design. Home to fashion brands Prada, Armani and Versace and furniture and home accessories powerhouses, such as Poltrona Frau and Alessi, it certainly makes a strong case for the title. Eighty-two companies hosted catwalk shows during the most recent fashion week, while the annual Salone Internazionale del Mobile, the world’s largest furniture fair, which kicks off its 2009 event this week, attracts 350,000 visitors each year.
Yet the city fails against Paris, New York and many smaller conurbations in one critical category: urban planning. As cities from Lisbon to Lyon have shed the worst legacies of postwar industrial development, buffing their international reputations through major investment in urban renewal, public space upgrades and transport projects, Milan has looked on – the Cinderella of Europe.
Despite its industriousness, many attractive assets and heavy lifting on behalf of the Italian economy, it remains saddled with a surfeit of obsolete and ugly architecture, scarce greenery, old infrastructure barriers, intractably tangled traffic and some of the continent’s most polluted air. It is so bad that renowned musical conductor and Milan native Claudio Abbado said he would only return to the Teatro alla Scala opera house if 90,000 trees were planted across the city. Milan’s residential stock is also in a dire state: whether charmingly traditional or semi-modern eyesores, most homes are at least 30 years old and, even then, in short supply.
But change is afoot. While the credit squeeze and stagnant property markets push construction cranes out of most urban locations, in Milan the stars might instead be aligning for an extensive, long-overdue redevelopment. This should include a €13bn makeover of the city’s transport infrastructure in preparation for the Universal Exposition in 2015 – an international showcase for national excellence – and, perhaps, a change to its development rights system aimed at creating dense, vertical, highly serviced, well-connected centres embedded in a system of pedestrian walks and belted by parks. Obsolete rules that outlaw even the conversion of ex-industrial buildings into Soho-style lofts should give way – if all goes well – to new frontiers in urban living.
When I spoke to Carlo Masseroli, Milan’s head of development, about all this last year, just after the Expo victory, he was upbeat. “Milan is experiencing a magical moment,” he said. “It is reconceiving itself, rethinking the development of the city, which is something that hasn’t happened since 1954.”
His voice was emphatic and had the hoarse edges of someone giving a lot of speeches. In fact, he was in the midst of a marathon campaign to persuade special interest groups that his Territorial Governance Plan (PGT) could transform Milan from a bottleneck city revolving around a tiny downtown into an integrated network of at least two dozen “epicentres” of activity, each endowed with an ample share of shops, public services, such as libraries and schools, transport and parks.
He claimed his plan would nearly treble the amount of green space in the city from today’s 12 sq metres per resident to more than 30 sq metres, even as the population potentially rises from 1.3m to 2m as a result of the improvements. Now in advanced stages, the plan calls for the transformation and expansion of abandoned railway yards and other obsolete sites – adding up to more than double the area of the historic downtown and one and a half times the land covered by all new development built since 1980 – into pleasant residential and commercial neighbourhoods.
Back then I wondered whether developers would actually gamble billions of euros on the many large-scale projects his ambitions would require. Milan has been a daunting market, especially for outside investors, due to opaque administrative processes, the importance of personal political ties and lack of public infrastructure investment, all of which poison risk assessments and balance sheets. “Projects grow old before they’re born,” laments Claudio DeAlbertis, the head of construction lobbying group Assimpredil Ance, noting that simply obtaining a building permit for large projects takes an average of 59 months.
The trouble is the city’s development rules date from the 1950s and are unsuited to contemporary market demand . Masseroli’s radical solution – which he, as part of the city’s ruling coalition, hopes to see approved by the end of this year – would turn development rights into tradable assets and include a public exchange, similar to a stock or commodities exchange.
The city would be divided into areas for conservation and for construction but all property would have a theoretical amount of allowed building attached to it, with the type and use not prescribed but determined by market forces. This “right” to build on a conserved site would, of course, be unusable but owners, including the government, could sell it to the owners of unconserved land. Thus, developers could amass the rights to create far larger structures than the rules would otherwise allow, up to a ceiling yet to be decided. Any parcels from which the building rights had been sold off would then become public property, allowing the city to accrue space it wants without paying for or confiscating it. At the same time, the money the government would make from selling rights from parks and other public reserves would help finance urban overhaul.
“I think it is very positive,” says Carlo Romanò, head of the real estate offices of Doughty Hanson in Milan. “In some cases, there were no clear regulations before. It has been difficult not being able to give international players a clear and objective notion of what they were getting.”
Still, some observers worry about the plan’s feasibility. “The ideas are very interesting but also very complicated on a technical and operative level,” says Matteo Bolocan, an urbanist at the Politecnico di Milano. Many sceptics also fear a pouring in of traffic and cement. But Masseroli argues that new residents and construction will fuel urban renewal, encouraging the conservation of open space and sustaining the costs of new services and infrastructure. He also claims Milan has room to rise: Paris is three times as densely populated, Barcelona twice so and London 1.5 times. “We must compare ourselves with other great European cities.”
Milan will also have to work hard to attract the massive private investment required. The good news is that its victory to host Expo 2015 at least imposes a deadline for the badly needed infrastructure overhaul. The city government and the Italian state have pledged to spend €13.2bn, including previously planned projects worth €10bn, some of which have hung in limbo for as long as two decades. Beyond the construction of the Expo site itself, Milan will nearly double the reach of its underground system and invest in three expressway connections, general road improvements and railway connection upgrades. (Of course, as I write, the Expo preparations have been put back by more than a year and securing the last few billion euros of public funding is proving difficult.)
“The big issue in Milan is the same as it has been for 40 years: transport, transport, transport,” says Massimo Tarabusi, former head of residential services for real estate consultancy Cushman and Wakefield in Milan. He thinks improvements could help propel the city from a “price taker” market, where central location is the largest factor in determining property cost, to a “price maker” market, where a developer can substantially influence values through innovative concepts, construction and design quality, services and project branding. And he points to a number of projects already pulling in that direction, driving gentrification in formerly depressed outlying neighbourhoods, such as the now hip Navigli neighbourhood, the office-centric Maciachini area and Bovisa, which has become a hub for science, technology and affordable housing.
Construction vehicles are also re-sculpting a great swathe of former no-man’s land just a stone’s throw from the historic centre. By 2015 the Porta Nuova mixed-use project, spearheaded by Texas-based developer Hines, should be a bicycle- and pedestrian-friendly, energy-efficient neighbourhood that planners hope will be among the most lively and liveable in Europe. It will be well-connected, with three subway and several bus and tram lines, two train stations, several thousand underground parking spots and 400 residences, ranging from townhouses to apartments, including Milan’s first Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certified homes.
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| A new, multi-centred plan is being drawn up for Milan, including buildings by architects such as Daniel Libeskind |
Tarabusi says he eventually expects owners of smaller-scale buildings in Milan’s historically dominant downtown to follow the lead of these developments, revamping aging, inefficient properties in order to compete with those in newly desirable, non-central neighbourhoods. Of course, this all depends on the success of the projects, continued market demand and less asphyxiated credit conditions for property companies. Debts have already crushed developer Luigi Zunino’s plans for two giant mixed-use projects designed by architects Norman Foster and Renzo Piano.
The massive public investment required to put on an Expo is no guarantee of new riches nor urban renewal either, as former hosts will testify. Spain’s Seville was left with a housing glut, while Germany’s Hanover lost hundreds of millions of euros. But if Milan officials start executing their plans swiftly and wisely, they might give the city an edge in attracting international investment during otherwise hard times and at least properly position themselves for the next upward cycle.
In the short term, the roar of machinery, torn streets and other inconveniences are not only making some Milanese neighbourhoods uncomfortable but also weighing down already slack house prices, says Fabiana Megliola, head of research for national real estate agency Tecnocasa. Still, she adds, when the cuts from the reconstructive surgery heal, the improvements should both improve quality of life and boost property values. Any homes sited near a new metro stop could, for example, see price rises of 5-7 per cent, while those with views of a new or revamped park might climb 10-15 per cent.
“Milan should change completely,” she says. “It will have an entirely new face.”
