Will the Tails of Comets Drown in a Green River?
’Great railroad lines cut furrows through the landscape/city as if they were comets trailing tails of dust/stars.‘ In 1987 John Hejduk described Milan with this phrase giving us the concise and synthetic explanation of the importance of infrastructure for Milan’s urbanity and the strength of its imprint. Around 1.300.000 sqm of the territory of the municipality of Milan are occupied by 7 rail yards that are or going to be soon disused. How to return these territories to the city? Ways to solve this problem were proposed during the workshop “Scali Milano”.
The figures of the railroad system create islands of discontinuity in the fabric of the city not just from the functional viewpoint but also from the morphological one. The rail yards are margins of the city, lacking any effective incorporation; they are interior islands voided of activity; they are forgotten, oversights and leftovers which have remained outside the urban dynamic. Regarding these obsolete infrastructural functions, many questions arose recently. How to restore enclaves for the rail yards to the City? After the recent building boom, what could be the following phase that could sew all disjointed places into one whole?
The question of Milan’s rail yards for years was the topic of many research, architectural competition, and intellectual discussion. Eventually, the city of Milan together with Railway Company Urban Systems decided to develop different scenarios for these areas. They engaged and consulted the city with a scope to define priorities and the main goals of the future development.
The five fundamental principles for the future of the rail yards that are defined during the public discussion are the Connecting City, Living City, City of Culture, Green City, City of Resources are carefully incorporated into the tissue of the new urban vision. Following the initial public workshop, the novelty in Italian urbanism that involved more than a thousand of the citizens, 5 international teams were invited to express their vision; Mecanoo, MAD Architects, Miralles Tagliabue EMBT, Cino Zucchi Architects and Stefano Boeri Architects.
Text: Milica Alempic
Illustrative materials provided by Stefano Boeri Architects
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