The city’s new Road. The fundamental role of nature in urban transformation processes

Abstract

As with numerous contemporary situations regarding industrial suburbs, nature and artifice, alternating over time, have provided Bovisa—a strategic area in Milan—with a legacy full of contradictory signs such as the negative effects left by the productive apparatus, the vigorous return of nature and the marked evocative value of the remaining buildings, living deposits of a not-too-distant past. The development of the project, presented in the context of a Call for Ideas (Moro in Bovisa, un parco per la ricerca e il lavoro. Maggioli, Milan, 2017), involves three main parts that correspond, in order, to the phases indicated for the transformation: the first regards buildings outside the Goccia area, intended for residence and commerce;the second is the link between the stations and the construction in the area of the gasometers of the Library and the Congress Centre;the third, along with setting up the park, entails, on its sides, the construction of the New Politecnico/Science Park and the residential system of the Strada Nuova, two diverse settlements, albeit conceived according to similar formal and constructive logic.The ideas expressed here, according to a single project aimed at enhancing the area’s features, propose a transformation process that will enable the construction of a formally defined and complete urban part, characterized by high accessibility and reduced vehicle traffic, built in a green environment according to principles of sustainability and equipped with activities, residences and services of a metropolitan nature. As a result, the general idea of the project tends to express, in organized and orderly terms, the traces of the phases which over time have created the Goccia di Bovisa area: the original phase of nature, the industrial urban service phase, the phase where nature returns to occupy the abandoned work-related spaces and the phase being proposed here in which the elements present are valued in relation to the characters and the size of the set of activities envisaged. At the basis of all this is the search for a balanced relationship between artifice and nature, where the latter, an original and fundamental element, makes up the primary place in which to structure the proposals of the new city.