Tommaso Raimondi for Shared Territories/Territories in Crisis

in the ordinary city

new ways to trigger contemporary spaces of contact

IN THE ORDINARY CITY New ways to trigger contemporary spaces of contact

relatore Massimo Bricocoli correlatrici Cristina Bianchetti Matilde Cassani Paola Sturla studente Tommaso Raimondi 834573 Politecnico di Milano scuola di Architettura Urbanistica Ingegneria delle Costruzioni corso di Laurea Magistrale in Architettura A.A. 2016/2017

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abstract This research aims at exploring the ordinary spaces of contemporary cities and at investigating the way in which nowadays social dynamics and contacts express themselves in the urban mileu.

Using as a reference Andrea Di Giovanni’s definition of spazi comuni, this thesis addresses urban spaces that are normal and ordinary, generic and simple, diffused and frequent, collective and public (Di Giovanni, 2010). It focuses on those parts of the city that often seem meaningless and unworthy of design attention, taken for granted as side-effects of current city developments: spaces whose dynamics are usually framed using as a reference the historical neighbourhood dimension, even if they are actually featuring relevant social transformations. Parts of the contemporary city that differ from emerging and gentrifying neighbourhoods, characterised by a rediscovered community dimension, as well as from inner city areas, animated by city users and outdoor life.

Although ordinary spaces seem to be significant only to a few segments of the urban population, they cannot be discarded or overlooked: the majority of city inhabitants still reside there. Their interpretation should be questioned right through the new tensions put up by the emerging contemporary urban system. On one hand, ordinary spaces are in contraposition with the rising networked space that concentrates around nodes and centralities. On the other hand, they are the terrain for proximity, still relevant even if mutated after technological revolutions. Ordinary spaces, then, are still alive and host new forms of living the public sphere.

The identification and selection of the specific physical context of UmbriaMolise area in Milan highlighted the potential character of ordinary urban spaces, firstly through an intensive exploration and an analytical

observation of its public spaces and secondly through the development of a design proposal. Understanding the ground complexity through categories related to normality and everyday-life allowed to overcome the image of a flattened and banal space. On the contrary, it unveiled spontaneous forms of sociality reflecting spatial and social practices. In between the internal residential spaces of the household and the public dimension of urban centralities, contemporary spaces of contact find their reason of existing.

Not only in a theoretical sense, but also in a physical one: a blurred threshold between internal and external spaces of two high schools and a student house is the means through which I aimed at the definition of a new place in Umbria-Molise. The traditional street is enriched by a different articulation of its borders, which enables forms of light interactions in relation with the public services.

If we look at the urban ordinary spaces and to their possible enhancement with the same attention as the one which is usually placed on urban centralities, it is firstly possible to underline a relevant potential role of public investments and services, since these spaces do not provide for an immediate economical return. Moreover, it would serve to recognise and accept the complexity of nowadays urban contexts, which concentrate or scatter over broad territories. A complexity that not only deals with the built environment, but also with the way people experience it: acknowledging a role to ordinary spaces means to recognise the different ways in which the public sphere is lived and the different public dimensions that take place in it.

The photos in the thesis have all been taken by me, except for the one on pag. 114.

summary INTRODUCTION 1. A NEW CITY ORDER? multi-scalar networked spaces contemporary ways of meeting a process of interiorisation new forms of separation 2. URBAN CONTACTS, NOWADAYS dimensions of proximity the rebirth of neighbourhoods ordinary spaces new forms of living the public space 3. ORDINARY LIFE IN UMBRIA-MOLISE approaching the area the inhabitants of Umbria-Molise services: places and people urban transformations 4. CROSSING FENCES borders and public space via Einstein, the context stretching floorings CONCLUSIONS BIBLIOGRAPHY

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introduction When walking through Milan outside of the main urban centralities, you often have to face a recurring cityscape very hard to orientate yourself in: streets look alike, with parking on both sides, asphalt sidewalks, introverted commerce and bad night lighting. If planted, trees are besieged by cars or enclosed in flowerbeds. The space seems simple and undefined, unable to provide meaningful landmarks (Lynch, 1960), as if all of its layers had been flattened. This reality, especially evident the first times you come in contact with it, does not apply only to the so-called “peripheries”, but also to areas well structured and characterised by a dense urban pattern.

If compared to similar European cities, notably from northern countries, it is evident a strong difference in street-section treatments and in the attention given to their design. Analogies, although hard to draw because of the diverse urban contexts, raise some questions on the cityscape image and on its correlation with design and urban planning issues. Would streets be different in Milan if parking was regulated? Could the presence of good cycle lanes make such a big difference? Many cities that could be defined as chaotic, in fact, have a strong character and recognisable landmarks too.

Is it then a question about the “character” of cities?

The cityscape I am referring to is usually the negative side of residential ordinary urban contexts, and therefore queries on street design pair up with queries related to the current meaning of neighbourhoods, and whether they need structural interventions or should be left to a spontaneous organisation. Could regeneration programs be the gateway to the current outdoor trivialised urban spaces? Animation policies would evidently affect the level of street life; but do ordinary contexts need an outdoor life similar to the one of gentrified areas? Moreover, one could not help asking oneself: is the ordinary city a relevant issue in contemporary urban contexts which

are facing a revolution in scale towards regional systems?

Ordinary areas are actually a recurrent pattern in contemporary cities and, so as to study them, it is important to acknowledge that they are different from urban centralities: therefore, they should be looked at with different lenses from the ones we are used to wearing when observing the city. The concept of ordinary does not imply it is meaningless and, when those spaces seem to have lost their character or no intervention could enhance their quality, the reason probably resides in our inability to recognise the practices that take place there: everybody, in a way, interacts with ordinary spaces.

I thus decided to focus on a study case in the city of Milan, so as to test these questions in a physical context. Moving from my personal experience as a student living in Milan who has resided in different parts of the city, I selected the south-eastern area encompassed between the streets of Viale Umbria and Viale Molise, and the railway stations of Porta Vittoria and Porta Romana.

The thesis is structured in 4 chapters, developing from a larger to a smaller scale. The first one addresses the new spaces of the contemporary city, the rise of a space of flows (Castells, 1996) and the way inhabitants live it; it explores the concept of interiorization and investigates the new forms of separation appearing in urban contexts. The second chapter addresses the dimension of proximity, the way it has recently evolved and the different forms under which it expresses itself in the city. The third part introduces the Umbria-Molise area, moving from the observation of its open spaces and public services to the attention on the way people consider it, as well as to the recent transformation that has affected its spaces. Finally, the last part of this thesis investigates in a closer way one selected space within the chosen area through a design suggestion. A proposal that aims at the development of a new relationship between the closed spaces of certain services and the streetscape, both under the point of view of practices and in a physical sense.

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a new city order?

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The first chapter addresses some phenomena that define contemporary cities, especially western ones, and that distinguish them from the previous industrial urban system. Moreover, it explores the dynamics that underpin the current way of living the cityscape and its physical consequences on the urban context.

In the last decades, cities have undergone a spatial fragmentation, spreading on their surrounding regions and defining a new network configuration of urban places (Shane, 2005). Networks not only have shaped contemporary metropolitan areas, but have influenced the way cities relate at a global level too, since an enhanced mobility and new forms of telecommunication have allowed a worldwide connection (ibid). The different scales intertwining in urban contexts concretize in what Manuel Castells calls the space of flows (Castells, 2001), which is the space where nowadays people, goods and information move: sometimes abstract, this space has also a physical impact on cities, developing around a nodal system.

Recent technological revolutions not only have affected the urban structure, but also the way people interact. New opportunities to keep in contact have freed inhabitants from proximity constraints and fostered the formation of what Wellman calls person-to-person communities: communication does not depend anymore on the physical being in a place and people can be reached anywhere thanks to their electronical devices (Wellman, 2001). However, as to keep up social networks, people need to move in the city and to coordinate each other’s calendars (Borlini and Memo, 2009). The increasingly planned social interactions bring city inhabitants to attend mainly selected environments that do not display any urban tension.

If social interactions have lost spontaneity, they have also experienced a process of interiorization in private spaces. After the advent of landlines and home computers, households and enclosed spaces gained a new role as social life centres: they were the visited ones, telephoned or emailed (Wellman, 2001). The interiorization and privatisation of social activities, partly related to an emergence of the autonomy of the self from the XIX century (Secchi, 2005) and to some researches and design proposals conceived in the 1800s and 1900s (Choay, 1969), has reached its maximum expression with the scattering of cities over broader urban environments.

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Under privatization and individualistic pressures, urban dwellers are actually getting increasingly interested by the choice where to settle their household, since the loss of neighbourhood communities has resulted in growing safety concerns (Wellman, 2001). This auto-separation tendency is part of the broader urban trend of definition of enclaves delimited by invisible walls and borders, not communicating one with the other (Petrillo, 2015). Donzelot affirms that the city is evolving at different speeds: some parts move very fast, in connection with the space of flows; some parts are almost motionless, sort of ghettos defined by a coinciding geographical and social immobility; some parts are in between: decentralised and lived mainly by middle classes looking for a safe environment, they move mainly transversally (Donzelot, 2009).

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multi-scalar networked spaces It might seem quite obvious to observe that contemporary cities have undergone huge and unique transformations during the last decades all around the world. It is well-known how, under different influences related to particular histories and social traditions, they have experienced an unprecedented expansion, so revolutionary to have brought to a switch in the scale of pertinence of urban studies from the urban one to the regional one. The old historic cores have become just one of the different parts that compose a city, changing their role in the overall urban system. As never before, a new paradigm is defining urban development and shaping the perception of cityscapes, configured in a series of concentrations and distensions of functions and activities, spreading over a broad regional territory.

This transformation has mainly been made possible by technological developments and inventions, which have spread around the world in quicker time frames.

Considering the case of Western cities, the first push towards the dissolution of urban borders was given by the diffusion of cars to the entire population: owning a car in Europe, after the second world war, became a normality and, as a consequence, individuals’ mobility sharply increased revolutionising the concept of proximity and the way facilities could be reached (Shane, 2012). Cities sprawled on the countryside that surrounded them under the pressure of a new growing displacement trend. Families started moving to peri-urban areas and to suburbs, giving birth to a new lifestyle highly depending on the use of cars. Telephones and televisions contributed to its definition too: every family owned them and had to cope with a sudden change in socializing attitudes, as the attendance of city leisure places became less necessary.

Technological innovations, summed with social changes related to them, such as the deindustrialization process, sparked off a crisis on the classical way of experiencing cities and caused uncertainty over their urban systems: working neighbourhoods, business districts, commercial streets started losing attributes. Françoise Choay affirms that recent urban and social transformations have allowed us to free ourselves from the categorization

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of zonings, moving towards a reorganization of spaces that overcomes the traditional definitions of living, working, entertaining (Choay, 1969).

Moreover, innovations in the telecommunication field have loosened the spatial ties from every point of view: from people’s relationships to fragmented spaces on the territory.

The new emerged urban space has nothing to do with the classical concept of a city enclosed by borders; on the contrary, it mixes up the urban context with the agricultural one, defining a sort of urban-rural patchwork (Petrillo, 2005). The new urban form has been largely studied and can be defined, using the words of David Graham Shane, as a fragmented metropolis, representing the breakdown of the old metropolis centre under the impact of the auto-age megalopolis, but also the re-centring of the megalopolis with multiple urban fragments of density (Shane, 2011).

At a broader scale, the new structuring system of places is mirrored in a globalised context: the development of high-speed means of transportation has affected space as much as cars did some years before. High-speed trains and airplanes, for example, have enabled people to move around the world in unexpectedly short times, allowing individuals to gain an almost planetary belonging. Again, this new global order and connection could not have been realized without the new telecommunication systems, which have changed the way people are connected to each other and move from one space to the other (Borlini & Memo, 2012).

Many authors have arrived at the conclusion that the newly-born urban space is shaped as a network, a web made of different spots working independently and, at the same time, in relationship one to the other.

Inhabitants’ mental map unravel through those spots, connected precisely to material and immaterial networks (Secchi, 2005). Bernardo Secchi, quoting Foucault, says that we live in the epoch of the simultaneous, in the epoch of the juxtaposition, in the epoch of proximity and distance [‌]. We live in a moment in which the world is experienced as a grid crossing some points and intertwining a bundle (ibid). This network space is kept together by the non-spatially constrained mobility of people and information, coinciding in a simultaneously abstract and material space,

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defined by the circulation of people, ideas and goods through cars, trains and planes, through electrical and electromagnetic waves and artificial satellites (Choay, 1969).

In a different way, Manuel Castells addresses the network space through the concept of “flows�, and argues that our contemporary society is built upon different kinds of them: capital flows; technological flows; organizational flows; image, sound and symbol flows (Castells, 1996). He underlines the existence of a new spatial form proper of the social practices that dominate and define our society and he calls it space of flows. It is the space where the material organization of social practices of sharing that operate through flows (Castells, 1996) takes place, and it is a space that links up electronically separate locations in an interactive network that connects activities and people in distinct geographical contexts (Castells, 2001).

If on one hand the space of flows is abstract and fluid because of its correlation with Internet and the telecommunication systems, on the other hand it still has a proper physical character. When the latest technological revolution was firstly theorised, it seemed that personal and working relationships could, at least partly, be displaced in the abstract space of the World Wide Web. However, reality has demonstrated that, even if those relationships have actually benefited from new technologies, contemporarily they have strengthened the need of a network communication, boosting the importance of spatial displacements too. Moreover, if the telecommunication revolution has decreased the number of functionally necessary meetings, at the same time new and usually higher demands are made of the places where the meetings are held (Hajer and Reijndorp, 2001).

The increased movements to reach work environments or to meet are visible both at the regional level (Borlini and Memo, 2012) and at the global scale.

As for the latter case, Saskia Sassen, in her discussion on the existence of global cities, argues that there has been a grouping of the main directional and coordinational spaces in determined strategic physical nodes, which have a specific location in certain cities. Again, the emergence of the importance of the ethereal service and financial economy, has not cancelled the role of cities in the economy but instead it has empowered the role of

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some cities because of the presence in them of some activities and functions (Sassen, 1991).

A new geography of places comes up, built upon a nodal system in which centralities are determined by the belonging or not to the space of flows.

Castells notes that the new urban world seems to be dominated by the double movement of inclusion into trans-territorial networks, and exclusion by the spatial separation of places (Castells, 2001).

But what do we physically mean when talking about nodes of an urban network system? To answer, it is necessary to say that the space of flows does not have a univocal interpretation, rather a blurred one, because it refers to different categories of places. It can relate, for example, to the concentrations of activities and firms involved in the international global economy, or, generally, to the places relevant for the members of the socalled global ĂŠlites. It can also refer to congress centres, fairs, museums, etc.: those qualified services usually experienced by people stopping in a city for a limited period of time, such as businessmen travelling for work reasons or hyper-tourists (Borlini and Memo, 2012). But space of flows can also be the circulation space frequented by commuters moving from suburban cities to certain central districts for work or study reasons.

What really defines nodes is not so much their connection to broader transportation networks, which is often a relevant part of them, rather the layering of meanings that sums up over them for different urban populations: Milan, 2017.

Piazza Gae Aulenti.

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their multi-scalar significance transcending the territorial level, addressed to different groups of people. Manuel Castells clarifies that the space of flows is not an exclusive space, but extremely related to the new huddled masses of the world, moving for mass tourism, international migration or transient work (Castells, 2001).

Sometimes, nowadays urban nodes correspond to what Marc AugĂŠ defined as non-places: spaces built in relation to certain aims such as transportation, transit, commerce or entertainment (AugĂŠ, 1992) crossed mainly for consumption or movement purposes. It might seem like that those places are losing meaning, as people just pass through them without establishing any real contact. However, we tend to forget how, when we are in the space of flows, we carry flows by ourselves too, being connected to our electronic devices and the world behind them (Castells, 2001).

No matter how the new centralities will influence urban developments, the interrelation between the presence of spaces of flows in a city and its appeal towards highly-skilled workers has become evident. And their presence in a city means economic growth, since a contemporary new knowledgerelated economy has emerged. Therefore, city administrations have begun structuring international networks so as to attract people and investments.

Cities are trying to supply for quality places and attractive venues. Through urban marketing and planning, they have been working in different ways to interpret the new demand of nodal centralities so as to attract the flows Milan, 2017.

Lambrate railway station.

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of financial capital or human capital (Cucca and Ranci, 2012). Moreover, once defined a certain city image, pursued through an aggressive urban marketing, the urban organization of spaces able to host those flows has to be focused on. Some cities, for example, have tried to decentralise relevant activities in peripheral areas inside the metropolitan area. Interesting is the case of Copenhagen, where a whole new side of the city was planned in Oresund, while in Munich huge investments were made in ex-industrial neighbourhoods; Barcelona, instead, bet over the requalification of popular neighbourhoods (ibid).

In conclusion, recent and contemporary urban transformations have brought to the rise of a new fragmented networked space, ordered in multiscalar nodes linked by material and immaterial connections. This space is absorbing the main city functions and concentrating urban facilities in restricted areas. Considering how space nowadays structures time (Castells, 1996), proximity to the urban nodes means increased working and social opportunities and enhanced chances to be in contact with the global network too.

Copenhagen, 2016. Ă˜resund.

immagine oresund

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contemporary ways of meeting The new urban space that has emerged in the last decades defines a mutation not only in the urban form, but also in the structuring of human groupings (Choay, 1969). The telecommunication revolution has highly affected the way people talk to each other and interact in urban places, shifting relationships to an immaterial and non-physical level. Portable computers and mobile phones first, then smartphones, have altered classical communication systems, enabling people to be in contact with each other overcoming proximity constraints (Wellman, 2001).

Discussions over the impact of urban environments on social bonding, and vice-versa, have been carried on since the beginning of the XX century: sociologists were asking themselves if the city expansion and transformation related to the industrial revolution was strengthening or weakening social ties and whether the sense of community was in crisis or not (Borlini and Memo, 2008). Two main contrasting opinions emerged: one arguing for the persistence of communities in neighbourhoods (Gans, 1962), the other one claiming the opposite, affirming that urban developments were flattening the sense of belonging to communities (Wirth, 1938).

However, both these interpretations seemed static in approaching the progress of modern social bonds, while the rising theory of social network analysis, from the ’50, looked particularly fitting: instead of looking at societies through their articulation in institutions, groups and social roles, the network analysis puts the individual and his bonds with other people at the centre of attention. This path has allowed researchers to free themselves from the constraints related to space observations and to look at social bonding with no preference on neighbourhood relationships: their focus was only on the individuals’ rapports, whether they were acquaintances or closer relationships.

Using as a reference the studies conducted by the Canadian-American sociologist Barry Wellman on the rise of personalised networks, it is possible to analyse the different ways in which technologies have affected relationships over the last decades and how communication has broken loose from the need to be carried somewhere by someone and it is now

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being conducted at the speed of light with the limiting factor being the speed of personal connections to Internet (Wellman, 2001). Moreover, it is also possible to understand how contemporary social groups act in the cityscape.

One of the first considerations from Wellman’s research is the acknowledgment of the door-to-door connectivity, as he defines it, that characterised communication in less recent times. Communities had clear boundaries, both when corresponding to neighbourhoods and to trading towns, and most relationships happened within their gates, rather than across them (Wellman, 2001). People used to meet personally to have a talk and, in order to get in contact with their acquaintances, they had to move somewhere, perhaps walking there. Proximity was the main way to bring on relationships and only the approaching telecommunication revolution, whose harbinger was the invention of the telegraph, allowed people to overcome it for the first time and to communicate through long distances.

Evidently, today communication is well over the physical limits of a proximity-based social system: as Wellman observes, if we want to obtain support, companionship or information, we much probably want to talk with somebody that does not live in our same neighbourhood or maybe not even in the same metropolitan area (Wellman, 2001). He calls the new communities, born thanks to the invention of the telephone and enlarged because of the development of home computers linking different households, place-to-place communities. In fact, relationships are no more Milan, 2017.

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dependent on contiguity but on the being in certain places: people go from somewhere to somewhere to meet someone, usually inside their homes. Or people telephone somewhere to talk to someone. The household is what is visited, telephoned or emailed (Wellman, 2001). As a consequence, we can contact friends or relatives that we have not talked to in a long time and who belong to different social milieus, even if we have little involvement in any of them.

Portable computers and smartphones, however, have brought a new turmoil in the structuring of social relationships and the way people interact in urban spaces. If, before their advent, a place had to be reached, for example through the telephone or emails, nowadays people are the addressees of phone calls or emails, no matter where they are. Callers and receivers are always available and always contactable, as they carry with themselves the devices that link them to the broader Internet-dependent network. When contacting somebody, I am not calling a household anymore where anyone of its members could pick up, but I am calling a particular person from whom I expect an answer. As people have not only been freed by proximity constraints, but also by place-related ones, Wellman calls this new way to develop social bonds person-to-person community. He observes how this further step towards an emancipation from space-related relationships is bringing two huge and unpredictable revolutions.

On one hand, it has fostered the intrusion of intensely-involving private behaviour into public space (Wellman, 2001). Since everybody can be in contact with each other wherever he is through online social networks and chats, often two communication systems referring to different spaces overlap and cause a contrasting behaviour in the physical reality: one is the communication system defined by the physical environment in which people are in, and the other is the one related to the cyberspace.

On the other hand, it has encouraged what Wellman defines as the mobileisation of people: crossing the concept of static places, city inhabitants can nowadays move into the urban space with fewer constraints, while being in contact with their acquaintances through social networks and their flows of information.

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Therefore, people, while taking care of their relationships, not only dwell urban spaces in unexpected ways, but also move in the city with unprecedented freedom. Borlini and Memo suggest that, whether the clock was the symbol of everyday life in the industrial society, nowadays the contemporary symbol is the calendar. In fact, city dwellers have to organise themselves so as to follow their agendas and to coordinate them with their friends’ one too, taking into consideration diverse times and disparate places to go to. They also notice how a large part of our online communications deals with meeting plans, setting times and informing of possible delays.

However, in addition to the social meaning of the calendar, there is a deeper implication for people’s lives: every aspect of the contemporary existence is subjected to a fragmentation in time and space and therefore the ability to coordinate every piece of it reaches a much more valuable meaning. As Borlini and Memo underline, the contemporary challenge consists in dealing with different places to attend at different times, such as working places far from home towards which they have to commute everyday; commercial services organised around diffused nodes in the metropolitan region, often reachable only by car; educational or leisure activities for the youngsters usually held in residential contexts close to home; entertainment opportunities spread in between the city centre and the urban metropolitan area; short holiday periods spent in vacation homes (Borlini and Memo, 2009).

As a consequence to the fact that spaces and times do not coincide as they did in the industrial era, people are in charge of the organisation and synchronization of them: this new added complexity to the urban lifestyle is the cause for a new kind of social differences. In fact, it has not to be taken for granted the possibility to move easily around the city or to have time to manage to accomplish working and social needs, as the financial and educational component is of great importance (Borlini & Memo, 2009). Inhabitants often have to make choices and try to gain the qualities of the bricoleur, as to fit together the different pieces of their lives (Hajer & Reijndorp, 2002).

Quoting Wellman again, he argues that the fragmentation of social relationships, both in cyberspace and in the city context, is currently

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generating another kind of community, which this time he calls role-torole community. He stresses the fact that the increasingly individualised pace of life, depending on one’s organisation and movements in the city, is deconstructing a holistic individual identity (Wellman, 1996). In fact, people are building their own polycentric urban systems, which turn around individual different parallel relationships in which they play different independent roles.

Hajer & Reijndorp argue that private life is getting so complicated that it increasingly seeps through the public sphere and they relate the need to allocate people’s time-space budget more efficiently with the flourishing growth of the “the city to go out” (Hajer & Reijndorp, 2001).

If we compare another time the current social bonding system with the past industrial society, it is evident how the concept of time has changed: in fact, timetables were once set to certain defined hours, such as working entrances and exits or lunch and dinner times; moreover, defined spaces destined to social interactions were predefined (Borlini and Memo, 2009).

Nowadays, due to people being reachable all the time by mobile phones, the notion of “meeting place” has taken on a fundamentally different meaning (Hajer & Reijndorp, 200). It is no more a default space where to go and meet; on the contrary, in strict connection with the enhanced flexibility in social relationships, it is a chosen space where to meet at the time you have decided to. In fact, the individual organization of space is not as individual Milan, 2017.

Piazzale Martini.

(Following page) Milan, 2017.

Piazza Imperatore Tito.

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as the term might imply (ibid) and it is more appropriate to relate to it as belonging to “urban tribes” characterized by shared interests, quoting Manuel de Solà-Morales. “Urban tribes” are groupings of people sharing the same concerns and the same ideas and looking for common kinds of experiences. Considering the fact that “meeting”, in its new meaning, is less and less a matter of coincidence or based in the routine of regularly visited haunts, such as the local pub or doorstep restaurants, it is possible to note the relevance of mobile phone connections in the attitude of gathering in certain places at given times (ibid).

As a result, public and collective spaces of the urban field are invested by different urban tribes claiming of territories where to explicit their social needs. The new city geography of places that is being defined is not at all spontaneous: it is planned with the aim of feeling at ease and avoiding tensions and contrasts, solving “discomforts” by moving around them.

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a process of interiorization If we observe how people socialise in contemporary city public spaces, two main contrasting trends arise: on one hand, it is possible to see a massive increase in the role of “events” and positive places in urban contexts, while, on the other hand, there is an equally massive avoidance of all kinds of negative aspects of social progress (Hajer & Reijndorp, 2001).

Using again the words of Hajer & Reijndorp, the conscious consumption of “cultural” experiences is complemented by the conscious avoidance of the confrontations with the proverbial “other” in daily life (ibid).

This new attitude in living public spaces has brought to a shift in the way people meet, as previously seen, and towards a renovated interest in safety and comfort zones. Urban public spaces nowadays have to be protected and clean, both for the inhabitants that want to be entertained and not alarmed when they go out (ibid), and for the tourists that want to have the impression of being in a polished past – metaphorically speaking – when they visit historical centres.

The same tendency in outdistancing urban problems and the social groups associated with them (ibid) is reflected in the sphere of the home, which has become the base for voluntary and selective relationships, in contrast with the diffused public communities of the past (Wellman, 2001). The privatization of social contacts inside households has often lead to the uncommunication among neighbours, which often do not know each other, and to a strengthened separation along social lines, weakening the exchange between different social groups (Hajer & Reijndorp, 2001).

Barry Wellman considers the domestication and privatization of relationships concomitant with the rise of place-to-place communities, who are social communities freed by the constraints related to proximity and based on the belonging to places connected in networks through landlines and home computers. In the structuring process of these communities, the household is what is visited, telephoned or emailed. Therefore, Wellman notices how, in domesticated communities, the main interaction and social bonding happens among small groups in private homes rather than in larger groups in public spaces (Wellman, 2001): people find harder to embrace new social ties outside of the enclosed social groups they are already part of, to meet

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friends of friends and to go beyond the concerns related to household problems. An example of that regards the typical dynamics of married couples and their community ties: husbands and wives, involved in a common social environment, foster privatised relationships that often do not engage with their home local area. Few neighbours are known and those known are rarely well known (Wellman, 2001). On the contrary, couples tend to meet their friends in common, to interact with each other’s families and to get support from in-laws as easily as from their own kin (ibid).

If we explore further the interiorization phenomenon of activities and social relationships, as always when studying complex social changes, we find out that there is not a univocal way to read through history.

The new predominance of privatised spaces that brought to a structural transformation of social lives refers to different social changes interwoven with technological revolutions: if on one hand the emergence of new means of communication allowed people to slowly free themselves from proximity ties, on the other hand, since the XIX century, a general trend towards life in private environments can be observed, accompanied by the dissociation of the domains for private and public activities, as well as for work and entertainment (Choay, 1969). Concurrently to the occurrence of these changes, mononuclear families were becoming the basic social units and, for the first time, the design of a domestic private space was recognised (ibid). In fact, private homes got a new internal configuration, which considered a layered privacy concerning the rooms.

This architectural twist was not the only signal of a growing individualism, since it was preannounced by the flourishing of the Romantic culture and, even before, by Italian and Flemish humanism, with evident outbreaks, at the beginning of the last century, in music, figurative arts, in literature and in dance (Secchi, 2005).

The new social paradigm evolved, during the XX century, in what Bernardo Secchi calls the irresistible emergence of the autonomy of the self (Secchi, 2005). The Italian architect and scholar underlines how people have refused, in a clear climax, the protection of institutions and have resisted to being drawn in the anonymity of classes or genres (ibid).

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He links this choice of self-affirmation to the tendency of closure in an individualism turned towards a particular space: a space able to host the growing private lifestyles, the contemporary values of the person and to the newly-discovered interests in the self (ibid).

Looking deeper into the subject, I would like to use the study conducted by Françoise Choay in her book “Espacements” as a reference, especially in the final part where she addresses the revolution urban spaces underwent over the last centuries.

Her observations move from the XIX-century progressive theorists Charles Fourier and Robert Owen and from their research: respectively, their design of phalanstères and quadrangles hid an early functionalism and the first elements characterizing the future shredding of public spaces.

Phalanstères and quadrangles were huge buildings theoretically intended to host large independent communities, placed on a continuous vegetal undefined space with no borders nor limits. Paramount in their design was the abolishment of the concept of the centre, and, consequently, of periphery too, and the dissolution of the traditional distinction between urban space and countryside. Not only did they symbolise a revolution in the urban structure, but also in the concept of urban environmental contiguity, considering how they intended to host specific functions only in specific associated units. Therefore, the new fragmented space was classified by its different functions, among which, the dwelling one took on a whole new Milan, 2017.

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importance becoming, in a way, parallel to the concept of working.

The only housing complex considered a phalanstère is the Familistère that industrialist Jean-Baptist André Godin planned and erected in Guisa, France, in the midst of the XIX century, for his factory workers. The structure hosted one-thousand-five-hundred people, living in an almost completely interiorised and fragmented space. There was a building for all their activities, from shopping to social gatherings, and the factory workers could move from one to the other with no need to go out or to worry about weather conditions, as “general circulation galleries” linked all the buildings. In such environment, the only planned space of contact coincided with the dwelling units, which were the most protected and private spaces of the housing complex.

The following century, Le Corbusier carried on the same path undertaken

by Godin, conceiving and designing his Unité d’habitation. In his opinion, classical streets marked by sidewalks and enclosed by residential buildings, as well as urban public spaces in general, had lost their original meaning and had to be replaced by a new interiorised space. His city image consisted in a series of unités d’habitation, containing any aspect of social life: spaces of contact would have been identified, therefore, with buildings corridors, rooftop gardens or open-air theatres (Chaoy, 1969).

Apart from these exceptional examples of research of a new space dimension, which have marked the recent history of spatial development, the privatization of sociality has strongly started affecting urban development after the second world war. In conjunction with the diffusion of cars and the emergence of place-to-place communities, cities exploded, sprawling and scattering on the countryside (Secchi, 2005). Not only did dwellings respond to the needs of individuality and privacy embracing the singlehouse dream, but also social activities related to sports, culture or leisure were subjected to the interiorization process. Cinemas, museums, sport centres, wellness centres, supermarkets dispersed in metropolitan areas, combining the dispersion of individuals with the dispersion of behaviours and lifestyles and merging the scattering of social practices with the one of the city in the suburbs and the countryside (Secchi, 2005).

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new forms of separation Even if the individualization process and the privatization of spaces related to the social dimension have highly affected the role of local bonds and proximity ties, urban dwellers seem to be still interested in the selection of the right living environments for purchasing a house or for children to grow. The abundance of within-household interactions and the scarcity of neighbourly communities has not brought to a real loss of meaning of the neighbourhood dimension, but to an increasing attention being paid by inhabitants to the choice of the most suitable district for them. However, it is possible to notice that the search for the right neighbourhood is not necessarily a search for the right set of community members (Wellman, 2001). People are not primarily looking for neighbours to get along with and establish enduring relationships: what they are looking for is a safe environment, protected, good for children’s education and for the elderly’s wellness.

Paradoxically, the answer to the weakening of neighbourhood communities and to the reduced community control over home spaces seems to be a renovated interest in the close living environment, demonstrated by the tendency to give more importance to considered-safe areas. In fact, when only few people know each other, the general impression of the neighbourhood is more relevant. Using Wellman’s words, the value of living in the right place may be another sign of individual and household privatization rather than a sign of a premium on neighbourhood community (Wellman, 2001).

In line with the expanding research of the right neighbourhood where to settle a household, Hajer and Reijndorp affirm that society has become an “archipelago of enclaves”, where people tend to group among those who they want to meet and to avoid those who they do not want to meet, developing effective spatial strategies to sidestep each other. They affirm that, on the level of the urban field, it is possible to distinguish between countless monocultural enclaves, from gated communities to business parks, from recreational woodlands to golf courses. It seems as if the various interiorised activities popped up in the last decades are not able to establish a relationship based on physical proximity. However, it is necessary to

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distinguish between the chosen enclaves and the enforced ghettos (Vaughan and Arbaci, 2011). Historically speaking, segregation has referred to the condition of exclusion of certain segments of population, obliged to live in determined contexts and deprived of some rights, regarding for example job opportunities or mobility. Although this kind of segregation still exists, it has been flanked by another one, subtle and unforced: a form of autosegregation consisting in the choice of a protected environment where lo live and to bypass the social confrontation with other members of society, perhaps different in lifestyles or behaviours. This kind of seclusion has often been identified with gated communities, even if its declinations are much more articulated (ibid).

It is interesting to show as an example the study that Paola Arrigoni has conducted on the area of the city of Milan around via Padova, known for its multi-cultural population. She has observed strong non-communication among its inhabitants, underlining different and heterogeneous forms of separation. Quoting her considerations, many people of non-Italian origin were separated both inside their homes or in immigration houses, and in public spaces, where they struggled to find opportunities to mix with native population. Also women, of Italian and non-Italian origin, could be considered separated, as they were embarrassed to go out and walk along the neighbourhood streets, often occupied by young males having the habit of excessively drinking. Separated at home were the elderly too, many of whom lived alone and felt disoriented in going out in such a mutated context. Moreover, middle-classes, after having experienced an impoverishment due to the latest socio-economical transformations, found themselves trapped in the neighbourhood. Separated, or auto segregated, at home were the rich people living in villas or in bourgeois residences as well. Living very little of the local context, perceived as dangerous and rough because of the coexistence of fringe situations, they preferred to have stronger relationships with their own social network. Finally, even the local associations could be considered separated in a certain way, as they often occupied a marginal location that did not allow any communication with the street (Arrigoni, 2008).

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Contemporary urban separation, rooted in the rise of new forms of social community and in the internalization of activities, not only affects people’s approach towards public space, but it is mirrored onto the way people inhabit urban open space too. Referring again to Paola Arrigoni’s research on the surroundings of via Padova, she noted how people seemed to gather and meet along lines of strong social homogeneity and origin, at certain times and in certain places (Arrigoni, 2008). Her observations did not stop at the recognition of separation issues, but concerned the physical implications of behaviours in everyday-life neighbourhoods. She witnessed the way parks were crossed by invisible walls, with Peruvians staying on one side, Senegaleses on the other, Egyptians on another one, etc.

In cities that appear more and more divided in different enclaves, polarised in different spaces, walls and borders do not have a passive role anymore, marking what is inside and outside of a certain area; they are instead active, characterizing neighbourhoods with positive or negative traits, producing a hierarchy of value among places, or determining no-go areas (Petrillo, 2015). Borders are mobile, and, as never before, they are flexible and undefined. They even attach to people, moving along with them, and displace invisible separation lines in the urban context. In relation to that, for example, it is possible to think of the concept of decay: once limited to architectural and urban domains, now it is used to define social conditions too (ibid).

Borders, then, define spatial differences, but characterise also people’s lifestyles. Under this point of view, the French urban sociologist Jacques Donzelot analyses the urban separation trends in cities. He reflects on the way urban society organises in contemporary contexts, and gets to the conclusion that three different levels exist, moving simultaneously at three different speeds: he calls them gentrification, periurbanisation and relegation.

Gentrification, as the name explicates quite well, is strictly related to the phenomenon of gentrifying neighbourhoods: space-wise, it refers to city centres and hip historic folkloristic districts, where cosmopolitan élites live for short periods, as they move easily from one side of the world

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to another: this level is therefore characterised by rapidity and mobility.

The second speed, periurbanisation, is the one affecting peri-urban and decentralized parts of the city, not only from a physical point of view.

These areas represent the refuge of middle classes looking for safety and good living environments and they are characterised by mobility too.

However, if compared to the previous one, this mobility is quite different, since it displaces on periphery axes rather than on the one towards the centre. Finally, relegation corresponds to stillness and it is characteristic of certain parts of the city interested by a strong social change: if middle classes are moving out of them, migrants are replacing the preceding population. These neighbourhoods tend to become places of relegation for their “ethnic” inhabitants, referring with “ethnic” both to their origins and a specific social condition (Petrillo, 2013). In these areas, a homogeneous population, apparently dangerous and potentially very mobile, is blocked and isolated: people have difficulties in moving out, both geographically and socially speaking (Donzelot, 2009).

The final image of the contemporary urban development mirrors, then, a very fragmented situation: cities are interested by phenomena of centralization around nodes of flows and, on the other hand, by a horizontal non-hierarchical mobility. Invisible fractures in the society open and foster an enclave-shaped structure. The different speeds that configure the new city order define different lifestyles and see a large majority of population living at Donzelot’s periurbanisation velocity.

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urban contacts, nowadays

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The second chapter focuses on the presence of bodies in space and explores a physical approach to life in public: the dimension connected to proximity has not been overtaken by the space of flows and, even where it seems inexistent, it conceals a potential contemporary way to inhabit public spaces.

If we picture a map of a city, much of its space is not occupied by nodes, transportation hubs, monuments or centralities: it is made of a more common space, that could be called, in Manuel Castells’ words, space of places (Castells, 1996). It is the space of everyday life, physically determined, built on concrete things having material substance, shape, texture and colour (Norberg-Shulz, 1976): space of proximity and physical interaction.

Rather than being substituted by the network space of the Information city, its combination with the space of flows defines contemporary cityscapes. In fact, researches demonstrate that proximity is still a relevant aspect of social bonding: even if different social groups live their social lives in different ways, contacts related to proximity are the most frequent ones.

Much attention has been given to the space of proximity and everyday life since the first edition of Jane Jacobs’ The Death and life of Great American Cities. The first gentrifiers’ desire for social interaction on the streets was forerunner for the evolution towards a more general research of authentic places: the highly-skilled nowadays global élite looks for an experience of origins, which they find mainly in inner city neighbourhoods with a recreated loosened pace of life (Zukin, 2010). As the presence of members from the creative class has proved to be related to the economic growth of urban regions, city administrations have started developing strategies to attract it: projects of urban regeneration have been financed to redevelop and aestheticize neighbourhoods, with specific attention to sustainable practices.

Despite the growing mediatic attention to gentrifying neighbourhoods, most of ordinary urban public space is getting undefined: on one hand, because of recent urban developments, it is often trivialized and simplified; on the other hand, it is losing its points of reference, as the neighbourhood unit is getting more difficult to recognise in the urban social context. According to

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Di Giovanni’s analysis, we could talk of “spazio comune”: a space which has as its main attributes normal and ordinary, generic and simple, diffused and frequent, collective and public. It is a space that seems of secondary importance and that lacks tension between a social request of renovation and a will of investment in new forms and uses by city administrations. However, in Manuel Castells’ opinion, the current space of places has to deal with new challenges, the main one of which lies in the dissolution of public space under the combined pressures of privatization […] and the rise of the space of flows (Castells, 2001).

Ordinary spaces, therefore, unfold different and new ways of staying in public, in contrast with the general approach to current urban renovation projects that tend to treat the urban context in a flattened way, according to the broadly accepted rules of animation, participation and need for culture (Bianchetti, 2016). Through a study conducted at Politecnico di Torino, Bianchetti observed that many outdoor spaces were lived as if they were internal spaces (ibid): interestingly, a renovated relationship between internal and external environments is also the legacy that Françoise Choay recognises from the medieval space of contact, often taken as a good example of place-making (Choay, 1969). Urban Interiors, as she called those spaces, imply a different concept from the one of chambre à ciel ouvert, because they do not frame peaceful places: on the contrary, they describe public domains that exist in between friction and freedom (Hajer & Reijndorp, 2001).

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dimensions of proximity As we have seen in the previous chapter, contemporary cities are experiencing an urban revolution concerning urban patterns, which is bringing to the development of network systems organising the different flows of people, goods and information in nodes. If on one hand social interactions are undergoing a process of interiorization, on the other hand they are concentrating in the nodes of the emerging urban scheme. However, when trying to picture the image of a grid in our mind, we immediately notice how it frames blank spaces within its structure. In the passage from a solid and centralised urban system to a scattered and fragmented one, it is impossible not to look to look within the new arising centralities and to observe how those environments are changing.

Manuel Castells, alongside the definition of the concept of space of flows, introduces the idea of space of places too: if the first one is the space of mobility and multi-scalar interaction, the second one deals with the places where people live most of their everyday lives (Castells, 1996); he outlines places as locations whose form, function and meaning are auto-sufficient within the limits of physical contiguity (ibid). Castells argues that both advanced societies and more traditional ones still depend on the presence of places, since people do not, and maybe will never, inhabit only the space of flows (ibid).

The concept of place that the Spanish sociologist uses had already been investigated before, resulting in different nuances in its interpretation.

Marc Augé stressed its relationship with personal and social heritage and legacy, defining a place under the framework of its identity, relationships and history (Augé, 1992). Christian Norberg-Shulz, instead, insists more on the physical characteristics of a place, moving from the common expression “to take place”: he believes that it is not possible to imagine any happening without a reference to a location. In his opinion, places are not abstract but totality made up of concrete things having material substance, shape, texture and colour (Norberg-Shulz, 1976) and this socalled environmental character is their essence (ibid). The concrete nature of places might contrast in times and experiences with the space of flows, connected to broader and sometimes invisible networks (Castells, 1996).

(Following pages) Milan, 2017.

Teatro Oscar.

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Both the rapport with identity and with tactility are relevant for city dwellers and for their development of relationships with places (NorbergShulz, 1976). In fact, people need to identify themselves with the environment, which means that they have to know how they are in a certain place, but they also have to orientate themselves, to know where they are (ibid). Kevin Lynch asserts the primary role of orientation too, adding that the “legibility� of cityscapes is fundamental in shaping cities and, also, heightens the potential depth and intensity of human experience (ibid). In fact, the physical presence in the space represent the necessary condition to dwell in a place and inhabited places are a constitutive part and foothold in individuals’ existences (Di Giovanni, 2010).

Nodes and spaces in between them coexist and do not try to win one over the other. It is the combination of networks and places, the interface between electronic communication and physical interaction, to transform cities (Wellman, 2001). This double system of communication operates simultaneously in the fluid space of flows and at the local and material level, and it is mirrored every day in our lives. However, as Franco La Cecla writes, some events have expressed the affirmation of this double system in a very explicit and symbolic way. He brings as an example the Arab Spring movements that took place in 2010 in different North African and Middle-Eastern countries. Even if technologies played an important role in structuring the revolutionary wave, in passing information and in Milan, 2017.

Piazzale Martini.

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spreading ideas, people still had to demonstrate physically against the regimes to show their protest. No change could have happened otherwise, if with demonstrations on Facebook or through social networks (La Cecla, 2015). Using La Cecla’s words, Tharir Square, among the others, became a real place when any kind of people, the elderly and the youngsters, families and students, Muslims and Copts, Islamic and laic organisations, bloggers and non-bloggers, gathered there (ibid).

Apart from extreme and emblematic examples, various researchers have addressed the role of nowadays ordinary urban ties related to proximity: in other words, scholars have tried to understand the role of neighbourhoods in our society after the loss of their long-lasting role as social base-units.

In fact, although the emergence of person-to-person communities, most human experience, and meaning, is still locally based (Hajer, M. & Reijndorp,).

Firstly, it is possible to mention Bonaiuto and Bonnes’ work on the geographical allocation of everyday-life activities (Bonaiuto and Bonnes, 2002). Their research was aimed at understanding where actions such as working, socializing, shopping or fulfilling cultural needs, were held in Lecce and Roma, two Italian cities very different one from the other both from the point of view of population and of physical context. In particular, they wanted to understand how those places were in relationship with the inhabitants’ residential areas and, to do so, they decided to use three space units as a reference: the household neighbourhood, the historic city centre and the so-called periphery. Their research arrives to the identification of four different groups of people according to socio-demographical and time variables, as well as to specific combinations of use of the three selected space units (Borlini and Memo, 2008). On a scale from the less mobile to the most mobile, they are: the confined, the evasives, the elitists and the hyper-actives. Bonaiuto and Bonnes recognise for the confined ones a lifestyle much related to the residential environment and to basic needs: people belonging to this group are mainly the elderly, often unable to move, children attending neighbourhood schools and playgrounds, and housewives. As for the evasives, they are for the most part youngsters

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frequenting both the household neighbourhood and the city centre, dwelling the space in a way defined as “evasive and a-specific�. The other two groups they identified, the elitists and the hyper-actives, are characterised by a more complex lifestyle in connection with an articulated social life. The first ones are medium-to-high income people that organise their life around specific and integrated uses of places: their social life moves from central parks to sport facilities, from their household buildings to restaurants. The second ones, instead, are mainly singles and under-30s that tend to move all around the city for recreative and working reasons. Passing over the questionable choice of identifying social groups with such explicit and authoritative names, it is interesting to observe how the neighbourhood seems to be still relevant for most of its inhabitants: at different times of the day and in divergent ways, everybody has to interact with it.

The emerging idea of a mutation in the role of the neighbourhood, instead of a demise of proximity, is addressed also in the second research I would like to quote, which is the continuation of Berry Wellman’s theories. In the previous chapter, we saw how he analysed the rise of person-to-person communities and the liberation of social ties from contiguity constraints: his further step consisted in the observation that social ties are considerably different from frequent contacts. Developing his analysis on Toronto, he demonstrated how, when contacts become the unit of analysis instead of ties, the percentage of local relationships in active networks nearly doubles (Wellman, 1996). Furthermore, when considering active contacts Milan, 2017.

Via Ciceri Visconti.

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with co-workers, who like neighbours are physically proximate, we find that two thirds of all contacts are “local” (ibid). As a consequence, since local connections are a sizable percentage of people’s contacts, it emerges a division between the network of people with whom having frequent contacts and the intimate helpful social network providing (ibid).

This results mainly in the understanding that proximity plays a relevant role in face-to-face contacts (Mok, Wellman and Carrasco, 2010): while distance does not influence the incidence of phone or skype calls, short distances affect the frequency of meetings in real places (ibid). Technology has allowed to keep up long distance relationships because of new ways to bond and be updated with each other, but it has not impacted on the frequency of face-to-face contacts among socially close friends and relatives, which has hardly changed between the 1970s and the 2000s, although the frequency of phone contact has slightly increased (ibid).

If we consider the still relevant role of proximity, at least for frequent contacts, neighbourhoods gain a new broader significance in relation to the new uses of urban space (Borlini and Memo, 2008), not only for marginal populations that cannot afford to dwell the space of flows or that are unable to benefit from it. They are not “residual” spaces (ibid), or spaces moving at Donzelot’s relegation speed (Donzelot, 2009). Neighbourhoods, as spaces of proximity contacts, play a new role for a broader spectrum of populations, that in some way deal with them.

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the rebirth of neighbourhoods The space of the neighbourhood, which corresponds to the household one and also to the neighbourhood where to work, still plays a significant role in inhabitants’ everyday life and, since the 1960s, it has been reborn under a new paradigm. In those years, the protest movement led by Jane Jacobs against Robert Moses’ new plan for a modern New York, which implied the destruction of entire parts of the city, brought the role of places to the forefront, giving them public recognition and a new importance for the development of the ideal modern city (Zukin, 2010). Jacobs’ book “Death and life of American cities” became the rule to a new interpretation of urban life and, through the celebration of the simple routines of walking to school, shopping in mom-and-pop stores, watching through the window to make sure neighbours and passersby get through the day and night (ibid), carried public and media attention to life in neighbourhoods.

To be more accurate, Jacob’s message was especially relevant for that part of the population, that emerged right from the ‘60s, and who could be defined as a new post-industrial educated middle-class, working mainly in the tertiary sector and often in close relationship with creative tasks, looking for a new urban lifestyle different from their parents’ (Lees Slater Wyly, 2008). The consumption-side explanations of the well-known gentrification process can help in understanding the reasons why inner city neighbourhoods, with their old-styled spaces, gained new attention and relevance. Beauregard pinpointed as the main argument the fact that they were able to answer the new gentrifiers’ needs of reproduction and consumption (Beauregard, 1986). Because of their proximity features, they allowed a very much outdoor-oriented lifestyle characterised by the attendance of the same places (ibid) and they guaranteed a vibrant social life in close relationship with cultural activities (Hamnett, 1991).

In fact, gentrifiers, who were mainly single and childless individuals who postponed marriage, necessitated a social life outside the household to meet others and develop friendships (Beauregard, 1986).

However, the changes in mobility and communication that we have analysed in the first chapter have evidently affected the perception of social interactions and dynamics in neighbourhoods and driven to the

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rise of a new creative class (Florida, 2002), composed by highly skilled professionals moving easily among the city nodes and the network of cities of the global economy, both for touristic and work reasons (ibid).

According to Sharon Zukin, this new kind of urban global élite is looking for a so-called authenticity of places, recognisable in the experience of origins (Zukin, 2010) which a city can create through the preservation of historic buildings and districts, the development of small-scale boutiques and cafés and the brandization of neighbourhoods in terms of distinctive cultural identities (ibid).

Generally speaking, there has been a shift in interests from lifestyles to places. If first gentrifiers were looking for a more interesting way of life, nowadays, creative classes, research a more interesting place to live in (Zukin, 2010).

Since highly skilled professionals work mostly in burgeoning sectors of the economy, a correlation between their presence in cities and good results from the economical point of view has been observed. Consequently, city administrations have begun to implement strategies so as to attract members of this international group of individuals (Cucca & Ranci, 2012) and to do so, they have undertaken two directions (Petrillo, 2010). On one hand, they are improving “hard factors”, which are aspects strongly characteristic of cities and often connected to national-scale decisions, such as the infrastructure system, the bureaucratic apparatus and the presence of spaces apt for hosting global flows (ibid). On the other hand, city administrations are investing in “soft factors” able to answer the new professional élite’s interests (ibid). They are putting in action urban marketing strategies to promote cities as innovation centres able to attract workforce not only by remunerative perspectives, but also by a comprehensive offer of lifestyle and work conditions (Petrillo, 2010). That is, they are developing leisure opportunities, artistic and cultural amenities, as well as […] a green environment (Cucca, 2012).

The urban strategies adopted have given great importance to the animation of cities, moving from the idea that people spending time outdoors and interacting with each other in enjoyable environments can experience a

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big difference in their quality of life (Gehl, 1987). As Hajer and Reijndorp notice, “animation policies” have also been developed so as to revitalise the urban landscape and to promote the active involvement of large sections of the population in the urban culture (Hajer and Reijndorp, 2001). Moreover, urban stakeholders focused on the enhancement of the environmental condition too: addressing sustainability issues is evidently of primary importance, considering the climate change that the world is going through; however, in the last decades, sustainability has also been an effective urban brand for cities competing in the global arena, especially in terms of their ability to attract investment, international events, highly skilled workers, tourists and students (Cucca, 2012). Policies to increase green public areas and to decrease traffic and road congestion, to promote green energy systems and alternative ways of recycling have been implemented, even if their connection with investments and events such as International Expo Fairs or the Olympic Games, have brought some scholars to talk about “ecogentrification” (ibid).

The new emerging localities and urban neighbourhoods can be considered as cultural products to be marketed around the world to attract tourists and investors (Zukin, 2010) and the new safe city environment, though not cheap (ibid), works as a catalyser for middle classes. However, their image is very far from the one of “urban villages” before the 1960s: the original urban communities were based on a real re-creation of a traditional way of living, while gentrified and hipster neighbourhoods represent only models of urban experience, in which authenticity is a consciously chosen lifestyle and performance, and a means of displacement as well (Zukin, 2010).

At this point, it is interesting to look at two examples of European cities that have dealt with urban transformations facing the XXI century challenges and have engaged in neighbourhood regeneration processes intended to promote attractive authentic places: Copenhagen and Barcelona. Both the Danish Capital and the Catalonian one have invested in the advertisement of strong urban brands about the main “soft factors” able to influence the professional global élites.

Copenhagen has bet on a green image, supported by the characteristic

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Danish attitude in moving by bike: it has become the city of a healthy lifestyles, where people have time to do sports, enjoy nature and taste the New Nordic cuisine. At the same time, city administrations have invested in the regeneration of inner neighbourhoods, that, one by one, have gone through a gentrification process. Most striking is the case of Vesterbro, once a workers’ suburb and a red-light district, today a “happening place”.

Sharon Zukin, quoting a Scandinavian airline’s in-flight magazine, notices how an advertisement on Copenhagen defined Vesterbro as creative, laid back… with nothing artificial about it (Zukin, 2010). In other words, the neighbourhood was presented as a real authentic place inhabited by diverse, multicultural, but also familiar and family-friendly residents. Put the gritty past behind, now it is a trendy and hip place characterised by an outdoor attitude and an inverted traditional family system: fathers spend time in the afternoons with children while sitting outside cool cafés (ibid).

After the gentrification of Vesterbro, the centre of attention in Copenhagen has become Norrebro, with its multicultural and colourful image, able to dispense the sense of mixité that makes a city aesthetically global.

The incentive for a more cultural mixed and socially integrated society was also one of the goals of the Barcelona Urban Renaissance Agenda, signed in … to guide the regeneration of Barcelona. Ciudad Viella, the historic city centre and main target of marketing and re-imagining strategies, has attracted foreign investments and new dynamic economic activities (Arbaci & Tapada-Berteli, 2012), under the name of a brand focused on culture.

Copenhagen, 2016.

Nørrebro.

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Differently from the Scandinavian city, the Spanish one has invented a brand out of nothing so as to attract people through one of today leading interests. However, if once Ciudad Viella was the entrance to the city, as the largest, cheapest and most flexible rental housing market in Barcelona, now it has become an expensive hip area: the new Western inhabitants are attracted by the urban pattern and by the architectural features of the historic city centre, but at the same time they have worsened the spatial separation between Western and non-Western inhabitants.

Despite fierce academic debate about the social implications of gentrification (Lees, 2008), it is evident how the neighbourhood concept has gained a new role in the city development and a new meaning for current middle and upper classes: looking for a recreation of original loosened lifestyles, the spatial configuration of neighbourhoods can be the ideal setting where to play authentic lifestyles.

Milan, 2017.

Isola neighbourhood.

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ordinary spaces If we look at a map of any city, it is possible to point out that neighbourhoods which gained mediatic attention because of brandization processes are a minority in the urban space. In a way, they could be considered as centralities, no matter if they are in the inner city or outside of it. In fact, these neighbourhoods present a concentration of activities, which take place there, and international perspectives that remind us of the multiscalar relationships of flows.

Conscious of the fact that urban geographies are not fixed and continuously change, it is then possible to look at the rest of the urban space: once approachable under the code of neighbourhoods, the cityscape outside of nodes is now more complicated to understand correctly because of the blurred concept of neighbourhood and of its borders that has emerged in the last decades. Borlini and Memo, after research analysis based on interviews of inhabitants, show how individuals belonging to different social groups have different opinions on what the neighbourhood is, according to their social network and their experience of the urban context (Borlini & Memo, 2008). Nonetheless, they recognise some main points of a core definition, such as a reduced territorial extension, a routine interaction between inhabitants, a certain degree of social organisation and determined functions that a neighbourhood has towards people’s life and the urban system (ibid). When looking at ordinary spaces in the city, however, those are the points that sometimes are missing, with the result of an even more unclear legibility of spaces (Lynch, 1960).

But what is the ordinary city in the end? What are the characters that define ordinary spaces? To answer these questions, I would like to use Andrea Di Giovanni’s words, who has deeply explored the concept of spazi comuni, literally common/ordinary spaces. He has built a definition on the different nuances and antonyms of the Italian world “comune” so as not to create misunderstandings with the theory of the Commons, I will keep referring, in the next paragraph, to spazi comuni.

First of all, comune could be used in the meaning of normal/ordinary and, in this sense, it is in opposition with special/exceptional: spazi comuni are therefore the spaces of everyday-life in public. Ordinary spaces, however,

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do not necessarily have to be banal or mediocre. In a negative sense, comune is opposed to original/excellent and even if ordinary spaces are often characterised by a flattened cityscape, they can still be original.

In another sense, comune means “general” and it is opposed to “particular”.

Under this point of view talking about spazi comuni means to underline the open character of these places, apt to host different uses. If we go deeper into this concept, comune also means simple/generic/universal, in opposition to complex/specialised/partial. Thus, we are referring to all those spaces that, in a city, support non-specialized activities and lack of predefined uses; they are spaces that, in a person’s life span, can have diverse meanings and uses, but that tend to conserve a certain importance as experience-based and memory references.

In the sense of diffused/frequent, instead, comune is opposed to concentrated/ rare. Spazi comuni are the ordinary devices of urban design and, through their composition, the cityscape is shaped. They represent, therefore, the elements that characterise a certain territory, and their particularity does not consist in uniqueness but in their regular re-emergence.

Finally, comune means collective/public, in opposition to individual/ private. In this sense, spazi comuni are those spaces whose property, juridical and symbolical, belongs to the social community. Similarly, comune can mean shared/participated too, in contrast with individualistic views of the city. In this sense, then, spazi comuni are enriched by local societies of shared meanings and are recognised as spaces able to shape Milan, 2017.

Piazza Donegani.

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communities (Di Giovanni, 2010).

To sum up such an articulated definition, we could say that ordinary spaces are the spaces of everyday life and, because of that, they are simple and host different non-specialised activities. They are not banal, but original, and their exceptionality lies in their regular re-emergence in the city scape.

They are the spaces of the community and shape shared meanings.

Even if ordinary spaces should be meaningful, especially in developing and supporting contacts related to the proximity dimension, nowadays they seem to have become unable to address the challenges of an evolving society. They often result in being banal spaces, where all their attributes are flattened in an inexpressive layout (ibid).

For sure, modernity has played a relevant role in this process of trivialization.

In the last 60 years, in fact, many urban and architectural interventions have not been carried out with a profound research spirit, and the urban fabric has often lost characters, rather than being enriched (Secchi, 2005).

Whether in the first half of the XX century a new research on the public domain had brought to new spatial experiments and innovative ways to conceive it, in its second half those innovations were applied in a very much simplified manner. This had a huge consequence in the resulting abolition of most of the architectural devices that highlight the passage between differently designed and dwelled spaces: the mediation spaces upon which the urban space richness of the ancient cities was built (Secchi, 2005) were eliminated without substituting them in a conscious and thoughtful way.

Examples of this attitude can be found in the way the concept of seriality was addressed in the French Grandes Ensambles and in the Eastern European Siedlunge, or in the way the use of pilotis was approached in the removal of a mediation space between the ground floor and the dwellings. Even more relevant to our research is the reduction of the streetscape to a simplified sum of few materials (the roadway, the parking space and the sidewalk) and to only one role (the house accessibility). Forgetting the diversity and richness of the practices that can take place on the street, its ancient role has been trivialised and not substituted by any other contemporary one (ibid).

Ordinary spaces, often characteristic of the scattered city, nowadays are

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fragmentary, undefined and unable to host new uses: even in new common design projects, they are often realized in such banal forms that they result almost unusable (Di Giovanni, 2010).

Architectural choices, however, cannot be pointed at as the only cause for the loss of value of ordinary spaces. Economical and social reasons have contributed too. As for the former ones, managing and taking care of ordinary spaces is expensive and, often, collective needs are not considered strong enough to justify the expenses. Moreover, financial and design efforts have recently concentrated more and more in the definition of the centralities where most of the urban activities have migrated, including gentrifying neighbourhoods (Di Giovanni, 2010). Regarding the social reasons, instead, the connected trends of enhanced mobility and interiorization of social life foster an unsafe and risky perception of open spaces, as well as a concern about getting in contact with unknown people.

Open public spaces are seen as insecure and hostile. In some cases, this hostility shows off in very explicit ways, claiming for separation. But, more frequently, it is powered by the micro-structure of everyday social interactions, especially in urban contexts (De Leonardis, 2008). Where this vicious circle takes place, unexpected results come up: on one hand, people tend to close in groups of looking-alike members while, on the other hand, perceiving and recognizing the “other� gets more difficult (ibid).

Although a growing interest in the quality of ordinary spaces, even outside inner neighbourhoods, is being expressed by city administrations, it seems as if the existing spaces are not put in tension by a structured and explicit social request. And, when spaces do not express the tensions underlying them, they create even more insecurity: Ota De Leonardis, quoting the writer Edwin Abbott, brings as an example the fictional environment of Flatland, which is a bi-dimensional space where people are figures that can move in only two directions. In Flatland, the absence of solids and shades makes it difficult to recognise each other and, when meeting, the contact with one another’s angles can be lethal: meeting by chance could end up in a fatal collision. In Flatland there is no conflict, but everybody is on edge (De Leonardis, 2008).

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Contemporary ordinary spaces should actually try to address that lack of tension that brings to a growing fear and should aim at the definition of a new form of contiguity, as Castell reminds us in his definition of places (Castells, 1996). In doing so, it is important not to give too much importance to historical urban solutions. In fact, examples of public space (old, new, and renewed) dot the whole planet (Castells, 2001). On the contrary, contemporary places present attributes never seen before because of the fact that they arise from the contraposition between two contemporary phenomena: the dissolution of public space under the combined pressures of privatization [‌] and the rise of the space of flows (ibid). As a consequence, two forms of present are fighting each other for the emergence of truly contemporary spaces (ibid).

The nascent space should host diverse practices with the scope of creating a true political space, in the sense of meaningful (ibid). They are practices, therefore, relevant for the structuring of society and for the meeting and confrontation of urban populations. However, ordinary public spaces are supports for systems of different social relationships that do not necessarily imply the belonging to a certain social milieu, a mutual comprehension and reciprocal trust, or any sharing of values: they are not necessarily spaces of the community (Di Giovanni, 2010). Although they could uphold local ties, more commonly, they are spaces for co-presence with no sharing (ibid).

Milan, 2017.

Via Lattanzio.

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new forms of living the public space

When facing contemporary urban projects for public spaces, designers often have in mind the ideal urban space of the past, characterised by strong ties related to proximity that were mirrored on a specific urban fabric.

Moreover, they tend to give easy and simple answers to the way people live in public spaces nowadays, as if the most desirable outcome would be a successful mixité (Bianchetti, 2016). Whether urban centralities have developed new design paradigms related, among the others, to heterotopias (Shane, 2005), ordinary spaces have not undergone a deeper research on contemporary and updated uses.

Medieval spaces, under Françoise Chaoy’s interpretation of spaces of contact, open up a reflection on the effectiveness of their example in the design of places in ordinary contexts. As the French historian explicates, they had deeper nuances other than the condition of proximity and the community use of open spaces (Choay, 1969): the Medieval space of contact had a holistic role in inhabitants’ lives, since it fused together the functions of circulation, dwelling and work. Houses and streets defined each other, they were rich in details and followed the ground without hiding any impediment on the way. Pedestrians were the absolute protagonists and, while they were walking, they could perceive the space surrounding them with all their senses: circulation and information functions were therefore blended in the medieval space. Moreover, circulation was strictly connected Conques, 2014.

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to residential and work spaces, since houses defined streets, exchanges took place in households and circulation passed through craftsmanship. In a way, internal and external spaces were merged in a completely totalising space (ibid).

Now, if we compare our time with the attributes that Françoise Choay assigned to the Medieval space of contact, it is firstly evident that information and circulation have moved to different domains and do not coincide with local interactions anymore. In fact, as for the information function, the physical city does not inform anymore by itself, since the modernist research for a clean and smooth space has emerged and the presence of cars flattened the cityscape (ibid). From a media point of view, moreover, space does not help to transfer information anymore: the advent of the press first and the telecommunication revolution then, made places lose their previous role. In a way, as we have already seen, information and circulation have actually fused together again in a common space, but on the level of flows. Circulation, on the other hand, has undertaken an independent path since the industrial revolution. Gained a specific space in the street section, detached from the the urban fabric, it has reached an evident result in the planning of XIX century so-called squares destined only to cars and unwelcoming for pedestrians.

Moving then to the relationship between internal and external spaces, it is possible to observe again a difference in uses. While, in the Medieval space, households and streets were lived in a similar way, the current progressive individualisation of spaces has brought to a process of closure towards the internal environment of the household; the streetscape, instead, appears more and more distant (ibid). However, the emerging gap between internal and external spaces collides with men’s natural attitude to facilitate the processes of orientation in space (Di Giovanni, 2010). In fact, dwelling passes through the identification of spaces and their appropriation and, as a consequence, to the coherent organisation of spatial sequences from internal to external environments, from backstage to frontstage (ibid).

In a way, the main feature inherited from the medieval spaces of contact and still relevant in approaching our ordinary places concerns the threshold, in residential areas, between the household and the outdoor environment.

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Dealing with this idea of threshold means not only to acknowledge the privatisation process of social activities, but also to cope with the current trend of transposition of certain attitudes in the public realm and to recognise the right weight to the cognitive function of relationships in public spaces (Di Giovanni, 2010). Cristina Bianchetti suggests to tackle contemporary public spaces through the categories of intimité, extimité and public, so as to put again at the centre of attention bodies, their turmoils, their passions, and, more generally, all the feelings that characterise the physical presence in a space: the positive feelings of inclusion and affinity, for example, as well as the negative ones such as anguish, apprehension and unfamiliarity (Bianchetti, 2016).

The renovated role of people implies the acceptance of any configuration of social relationships in the public realm, including the desire to stay on one’s own. Intimité, in fact, could mean to find shelter in public spaces or to be able to talk and express a private dimension outside of enclosed private spaces (ibid).

As for the concept of extimité, it could be defined as the desire to show off certain aspects of one’s self that previously were considered part of the intimacy. Differently from the pathology of exhibitionism, it is constitutive of the person and it is necessary for a good psychic development, especially for the definition of a right self-image (). In this sense, the consideration of extimité in the analysis of public spaces considers all the practices related to the communication, intimate or not, among friends or relatives: it is the transposition of certain attitudes connected to intimacy in a sphere that goes further than one’s self, without breaking into the public condition.

The public condition, in fact, is something different: it is the dimension of standing in front of many people or, more generally, it is the selective presentation of one’s self to strangers. Experiencing the dimension of public means to get in contact with the others from a certain distance.

The image of a city fragmented not only in physical terms, but also under the point of view of uses and practices, where relationships among people should be supported and a new communication between internal and

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external spaces or domestic and urban environments should be triggered, was, with all due differences, very similar to the one that Aldo van Eyck had to face when asked to design a set of playgrounds in Amsterdam, in 1947 (Bello, 2015). Van Eyck saw in those marginal spaces an opportunity to put the needs of the individuals at the centre, especially children’s, and to encourage personal and multiple experiences between spaces and bodies (ibid). In their minimal design, with no borders and clear separations, playgrounds were unique in a new modern way: they were characterised by a hybrid dimension between individual and collective uses, public and private spheres. Moreover, they expressed an idea of public space that involved different practices to be staged on them so as to fill the space (ibid).

Cristina Bianchetti talks about Urban Interiors when she considers nowadays heterogeneous and fragmented spaces, not demanding to be compact or smooth. Differently from chambres Ă ciel ouvert, which are exterior and public spaces treated as interiors and expressing peace and protection, urban interiors, even if in a domestic way, do not present any reassuring character. On the contrary, they are kind of anxious spaces, where a negotiation between the possibility to find shelter or to expose oneself takes place: distance and desire contribute in the creation of a productive tension for the public domain (Bianchetti, 2016).

A research she conducted at Politecnico di Torino arrived to the identification of different spaces that could be defined as urban interiors because of their Milan, 2017.

Piazzale Cuoco.

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use and of the particular atmospheres which permeated them. They were generated by the density of the specific relationships that arose there, with no intention to mimic the virtuosos and impersonal aspects of modern public space (ibid). Even if not reserved in any way, the urban interiors from Turin were not shared by everyone. An example of them is the bridge Domenico Carpagni over the Po river. Equipped with waning steps facing the river, it should be a space where to rest and sunbathe. However, nowadays logic of riversides consisting in showing off and being seen by the others is inverted: people often use the steps as to find shelter, close to the traffic but at the same time separated from it. Another example is Largo Saluzzo in San Salvario neighbourhood, which is an urban traditional space expanding and shrinking in accordance with different times of the day and of the uses that take place there. It is an elastic environment determined by a condition of contiguity among the different spaces that compose it: It is a space where to meet in public, even if no device suggests this function.

Urban Interiors are, in the end, dynamic spaces and, most of all, subjective.

Being physically in a place stimulates personal perspectives of it.

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3

ordinary life in Umbria-Molise

approaching the area In the attempt to investigate the concept of neighbourhood in the city of Milan, with particular attention to ordinary contexts, I dealt with different and various methods, in accordance to the knowledge I obtained and the opportunities I had.

First of all, I oriented myself using the references I got from my life experience in Milan in the last 5 years and from the urban studies related to my university career, often focused on urban development and changes in the city of Milan. Secondly, I confronted myself with some Milanese-born people and asked them their own way to orientate themselves and read the urban context so that I got a better idea of the common point of view on certain parts of the city and the impression that people have of them. Thirdly, I surfed web mapping services such as Google Maps to observe the city form and its urban transformations from a zenithal point of view. A top view perception through these services not only interested me for morphological reasons, but also for some more information on the geography of places dotting the city. Using the Google Maps service, it is possible to recognise an effort in mapping the development of neighbourhoods and the rise of new identities: great importance is given to the representation of pedestrian and commercial areas, as it is possible to see from the brown colouring of buildings with commercial activities on the ground floor.

As a result of these investigations, I could notice how hard it was to identify certain parts of the city and how divergent was the interpretation of web mapping services from the city inhabitants’ perception. This difficulty was even stronger in all those contexts not concerned by any heavy urban transformation, which are in a way outside of the mediatic mapping of places.

Among the areas I looked at, I was especially interested in the southeastern part of Milan encompassed by the two main roads of Viale Umbria and Viale Molise, and enclosed on the northern side by the empty area over Porta Vittoria light-train station and, on the southern side, by the railway towards Porta Romana station. Recalling its borders, I will name from now on this area “Umbria-Molise�.

Eastern part of Milan.

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Google Maps calls it Calvairate, which was perhaps the first reason why I was intrigued by it. On one hand, I was surprised by the fact that I had never heard anybody referring to that part of the city in that way: I knew that an early-XX-century social housing complex in the northern part had that name, but I had only associated it to that complex. On the other hand, I was intrigued by the name Calvairate in itself, ending with the suffix -ate which usually, in the urban region around Milan, refers to ancient villages or cities with historical origins. Places whose names end that way usually evolved in cities or were absorbed in the dense city pattern: in the latter case, they usually emerge as neighbourhoods with a narrower street pattern. However, this was not the case of Calvairate, which did not show any historical characteristics or relevant churches recalling an ancient past.

As for my experience, I seldom entered in contact with the area UmbriaMolise and almost never stopped there. I did only because the well-known circular bus lines 90/91 pass through it, and because sometimes I cycled across it on my way to Porta Romana. When passing through, my feeling was of being quite lost, unable to see notable points of reference and useful to orientate myself.

Even after the first intentional visits to Umbria-Molise I struggled to find elements that could help me describe the area. I was looking for characteristics that reminded me of a neighbourhood according to the common meaning of the word, but I hardly found some. I could not perceive recognisable elements in the structure of open spaces in the upper part of Umbria Molise too (Piazzale Martini, Via Ciceri Visconti and Piazza Insubria), because I looked at them using some common past categories to analyse the cityscape. These spaces all seemed to me very ordinary ones, literally invaded by cars, where not even residents were interested to spend time in, apart from some groups of old people or children.

To understand some of the reasons responsible for the lack of general interest over Umbria-Molise, it is possible to observe how the main projects that were planned to be realised in the surroundings, have been called off and, also, the opportunities for further developments have not reached any

The selected area in between Viale Umbia and Viale Molise.

(Following pages) Milan, 2017.

Piazzale Martini.

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75

76

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real turning point yet. Moving counter-clockwise from the northern side, the project of a mixed-use area of residential/commercial buildings and a new European Library for Milan was never completed. If the residential part, after the construction company’s bankruptcy, has been concluded, the library project has left a huge fenced empty space with no destination of use. On the north-eastern corner, there is the unused former slaughterhouse of the city: a vast site, abandoned since the beginning of the XXI century, still waiting to be addressed for future use. Nowadays only the independent centre for art, culture and research Macao is set in one of its pavilions, although not officially authorised by the Council. Moving south, there is a complex space that should be considered altogether a park, Parco Alessandrini, but at the moment it hosts different functions: the northern part corresponds to the actual park, while the middle area hosts a tensionedstructure base for the event venue Teatro LinearCiack and the southern part is designated to a Sunday flea market particularly significant to immigrant people, especially from North-African countries. Finally, beginning from the south-western corner of Umbria Molise next to Piazzale Lodi, the broad walled open space of Porta Romana railway yard opens. Still mainly abandoned, a lot of attention has been posed at it because the City Council believes it could undergo a huge redevelopment program. Further south, an ex-industrial area has already begun a reconversion process which got validated by the construction of a new headquarter for the Prada Foundation designed by the well-known architect Rem Koolhaas.

Interestingly enough, none of the planned transformations would have actually taken place in the area of Umbria-Molise, but, at the same time, they could have affected it as a side effect for their closeness to the area.

However, their cancellation or failure accentuated the ordinary character of Umbria-Molise, area outside of any space of flows, with no superscalar centralities, enclosed in its everyday-life residential space. Not to absolutize the growing impression Umbria-Molise gave me as an example of ordinary neighbourhood in the city of Milan, I conducted some research online through blogs, Facebook pages and local newspapers to understand better the common opinion about it. While surfing the net, I bumped into Different kinds of centralities around Umbia-Molise.

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the blog Urbanfile, whose point of view seemed to me to fit the opinion I was looking for. The description that was given of Umbria-Molise was: Povera Calvairate… la zona racchiusa da Viale Umbria, Via Monte Ortigara, Via Tertulliano e Ortomercato è forse a oggi una delle più dimenticate e poco stimolanti.

Qui non ci sono grandi investitori, palazzi importanti, università, grandi ospedali, o nuovi spazi espositivi.

Da queste parti nessuno ha mai pensato di movimentare l’area durante il Fuorisalone, da queste parti non si viene per i locali notturni, da queste parti c’è lo stallo di tutto, compreso quello immobiliare1.

Apart from the identification of Umbria-Molise with the name Calvairate, as in Google Maps, I was particularly attracted by two points that this quote clarified: the need for special activities to animate the neighbourhood and the concept that without huge urban or social transformations a neighbourhood cannot be stimulating.

In order to understand Umbria-Molise, then, I moved onto different levels and approaches: from a top-down analysis using maps and online mapping services to personal surveys and visits to the area at different times of the day and of the week, as well as in different seasons. Moreover, I interviewed some important inhabitants of this part of the city, such as Architect Lorenzo Consalez, whose firm is based in Via Cadolini, and Professor Roberta Cucca, now based in Vienna, who lived in Piazza Insubria for a period of her life.

As a consequence to this way of investigating Umbria-Molise, I managed to understand the way this part of the city is inhabited quite informally, without moving from the academic study of historical urban plans and the layering of the urban fabric.

“Poor Calvairate... the area encompassed within Viale Umbria, Via Monte Ortigara, Via Tertulliano and Ortomercato is perhaps one of the most forgotten and less stimulating [in Milan]. Here, there are no big investors, important buildings, universities, big hospitals or new exhibition spaces. Around here, nobody ever thought to animate the area during the Fuorisalone; around here, there is no nightlife; around here, there is a total impasse, under the real estate side too.”

1

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Public transportation network in the Umbria-Molise area. Dotted lines stand for buses; dashed lines represent tramways; continuous lines stand for light-railway systems (the underground and the suburban railway network).

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the inhabitants of Umbria-Molise When walking through Umbria-Molise, it is quite difficult to recognise any attribute that defines a neighbourhood in the common way to intend it. This opens a reflection on what are the attributes that define a neighbourhood: on one hand, neighbourhood is a concept very familiar to any city dweller, but on the other hand it is quite complicated to unfold. In fact, it could refer to many different factors and contingencies, among which the predominance of a social group in a determined area, the architectural and urban typologies that characterise a part of a city, the cost and the prestige of houses in a certain zone or its connection with the rest of the city (Borlini & Memo, 2008). Nowadays, it seems even more complicated to address the concept of neighbourhood, in view of the increased mobility and the rise of multi-scale relationships and communities (ibid). However, Borlini and Memo manage to identify three main cruxes helpful in the identification of a contemporary concept of neighbourhood, sort of fundamental characters that underpin the different definitions that scholars have given about it: a small territorial extension; an everyday interaction between inhabitants and a certain level of social organisation; the kind of functions the neighbourhood has for people’s lives and for the urban system (Borlini & Memo, 2008). As two out of three of these points deal with the inhabitants’ social interactions, they argue that only through the understanding of the inhabitants’ personal mental maps it could be possible to define the feathered borders of an urban unit. Moreover, borders could vary a lot due to different points of view of social groups’ members, integrated in diverse social networks and experiencing disparate urban contexts. In fact, due to the enhanced possibilities of mobility related to relationships and activities, it is relevant to recognise how neighbourhood’s inhabitants do not mirror its residents, but include also people moving there for some activities from other parts of the city.

During the first visits to Umbria-Molise, I was more influenced by the physical aspects of the area and of the way it was structured. I had the impression that it was quite plain and homogeneous, since the cityscape at eyelevel was quite repetitive: cars parked everywhere, a uniform street section with no hierarchies and some green areas badly designed. As I previously mentioned, I had some trouble to orientate myself using the

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usual parameters. Moreover, the impression I had of a uniform part of the city was confirmed by the analysis I came across some statistical data about population. After having found out that Umbria-Molise corresponds exactly to one of the units Milan is subdivided in for analytical purposes, called Nuclei di IdentitĂ Locale, I compared some data with the general trends of the city of Milan. The points of view I took into consideration were the expected growth of the population in the next twenty years, the ageing trend, the immigrant rate of the inhabitants and the typologies of families that live in the neighbourhood: the results showed a situation in Umbria-Molise very close to the general statistics of the city.

However, I had the impression that the area was not so uniform and conflictfree as it seemed to be. Deeper observations in Umbria-Molise, in fact, made me realise how that homogeneity hid some differences and internal fractions, confirmed then by the interviews I carried out with some relevant inhabitants of the area. Umbria-Molise did not reflect any neighbourhood attributes because it was hardly considered as a whole neighbourhood.

Some smaller parts of it, instead, could be intended that way.

The most recognisable one corresponds to the social housing complexes of Molise and Calvairate: as in many similar contexts, residents are mainly part of disadvantaged segments of society, including a large majority of people of foreign origin. The sense of belonging to Calvairate neighbourhood can be found, for example, in the lyrics and videos of the local rapper Rkomi, who often refers to the areas of Piazza Insubria, Via Ugo Tommei and Piazzale Martini as his home.

Much less recognisable, but still evident, is what could be called Tertulliano neighbourhood: it corresponds to the area around Via Tertulliano, in the southern part of Umbria-Molise. Inhabited by wealthier families, it has recently undergone a shift in the working environment that characterises it. Once industrial area, it now hosts firms in the field of architecture and design, as well as two big supermarkets/shopping centres. Also, two high schools, a Liceo Scentifico and an Istituto Tecnico, are based here.

A third area in between, kind of blurred and difficult to name, can be identified too: physically closer to Calvairate, people-wise it seems more

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20/29 10/19 2000 0/9

1500

1000

500

0

500

1000

1500

2000

2000

1500

1000

500

0

500

1000

1500

2000

2007

2015

Social pyramid in Umbria Molise, compared to Milan.1 90 80/89

1999

1999 70/79 60/69 90 50/59 80/89 40/49 70/79 30/39 60/69 20/29 50/59 10/19 40/49 0/9 30/39 20/29 2000 10/19 0/9

1500

2000

1000

1500

1000

0

500

500

500

0

500

1000

1000

1% 5% 11% 14% 13% 13% 17% 2000 12% 6% 7%

1500

1500

2007

90 2007

80/89 70/79 90 60/69 80/89 50/59 70/79 40/49 60/69 30/39 50/59 20/29 40/49 10/19 30/39 0/9 20/29 10/19 2000 0/9

1% 4% 10% 14% 14% 13% 17% 13% 7% 7%

2000

2000

1500

1000

500

0

500

1000

1500

1500

1000

500

0

500

1000

1500

2015

2015 1%

2007 7%

10% 11% 14% 17% 16% 9% 7% 8%

2000

1500

1000

500

0

500

1000

1500

2000

1500

1000

500

0

500

1000

1500

2000

1% 6% 10% 11% 14% 17% 14% 10% 8% 9%

90 80/89 70/79 60/69 90 50/59 80/89 40/49 70/79 30/39 60/69 20/29 50/59 10/19 40/49 0/9 30/39 20/29 2000 10/19 0/9

Familiar nuclei composition in 2007 and 2008 in Milan.1

1% 5% 11% 13% 12% 16% 17% 9% 7% 9%

2000

2035

2035

90 80/89 70/79 90 60/69 80/89 50/59 70/79 40/49 60/69 30/39 50/59 20/29 40/49 10/19 30/39 0/9 20/29 10/19 2000 0/9

1% 6% 12% 12% 12% 16% 17% 9% 6% 2000 8%

2015

2000

1500

1000

500

0

500

1000

1500

2000

1500

1000

500

0

500

1000

1500

2000

2007 2014

2035

140000 90 80/89 70/79 120000 60/69 50/59 90 40/49 80/89 30/39 70/79 100000 20/29 60/69 10/19 50/59 0/9 40/49 30/39 2000 80000 20/29 10/19 0/9

1000

500

0

500

1000

1500

2000

1500

1000

500

0

500

1000

1500

2000

2000

1500

1000

500

0

500

1000

1500

80 e +

2000

1500

90 80/89 70/79 60/69 50/59 40/49 30/39 20/29 10/19 0/9

35-64

60000

2035

2015

2000

40000

All data is retrieved from the official website of the Milan Council.

Available at http://dati.comune.milano.it/ [Accessed 22 April 2017]

1

84

80 e +

35-64

65-79

single

18-34

65-79

single parent with all adult children

18-34

80 e +

18-34

single parent 35-64 with at least one underage children 65-79

80 e +

65-79

18-34

35-64

married couple with no children

80 e +

65-79

35-64

18-34

80 e +

18-34

2000

married couple with all adult children

1500

80 e +

65-79

35-64

18-34

1000

married couple 35-64 with at least one underage children 65-79

500

80 e +

65-79

35-64

18-34

0

couple with no children

500

80 e +

80 e +

18-34

1000

couple with all adult children

1500

couple with 35-64 at least one underage children 65-79

2000

65-79

35-64

40/49 30/39 20/29 10/19 0/9

other typologies

20000 90 80/89 70/79 60/69 0 50/59

18-34

2035

Residents and their origins, compared to Milan.1 2007

Residents: 22314

Underaged among residents of non-Italian origin: 858 (19,5%)

Italy Fhilippines Egypt Maroc Peru Ecuador

1999

2015

Milano

Umbria Molise

83,6% 3,1% 2,5% 1,3% 1,1% 1,0%

92,1% 1,2% 0,9% 0,6% 0,5% 0,4%

Italy Fhilippines Egypt China Peru Ecuador

86,4% 2,2% 1,8% 1,1% 1,1% 1,0%

Milano

Umbria Molise

Italy Fhilippines Egypt China Peru Maroc

89,7% 2,1% 1,9% 0,8% 0,8% 0,4%

Italy Fhilippines Egypt Maroc Peru Ethiopia

Milano

Umbria Molise

Residents of non-Italian origin: 4405 (19,7%)

80,4% 3,5% 2,7% 1,3% 1,1% 1,1%

Italy Fhilippines Egypt Peru Maroc Romania

Italy Fhilippines Egypt China Peru Sri Lanka

81,0% 3,1% 2,7% 2,0% 1,5% 1,2%

Familiar nuclei composition in 2007 and 2008 in Umbria-Molise.1

2007 2014

2500

2000

1500

1000

85

80 e +

65-79

35-64

single

18-34

80 e +

65-79

35-64

single parent with all adult children

18-34

80 e +

18-34

single parent 35-64 with at least one underage children 65-79

80 e +

65-79

35-64

married couple with no children

18-34

80 e +

65-79

35-64

married couple with all adult children

80 e +

35-64 married couple with at least one 65-79 underage children

18-34

80 e +

65-79

35-64

couple with no children

18-34

80 e +

65-79

35-64

couple with all adult children

65-79

18-34

couple with at least one 35-64 underage children

65-79

35-64

other typologies

18-34

0

80 e +

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in connection with Tertulliano.

These three different identities, once understood, are visible from different perspectives. For example, they are reflected in the housing market too: again, if considered as a whole, prices in Umbria-Molise are in line with the city average, while, when zooming in, they vary much, especially between Calvairate and Tertulliano. Internal fractions in Umbria Molise emerge in many subtle ways, among which above all in the manner of living outdoor or in some situations related to the social sphere. Two of them are the use of open spaces and the schooling phenomenon.

Regarding the use of open spaces, it is for example possible to notice how parents with children living close to the western side of Piazzale Martini and Piazza Insubria prefer to let their children play at Giardini Candia, or Parco Marinai d’Italia, rather than at the playgrounds close to their homes, where numerous children of foreign origin, mainly from Calvairate neighbourhood, play. Even if Giardini Candia is much further, the fact it is a fenced area with much supervision and a clear target makes it a more attractive space.

As for schooling, instead, which is the practice of a focused selection of an educational context to which inscribe children (Borlini & Memo, 2008), growing concern by Italian families is developing into a separated use of services. Broadly speaking, schooling it is a strategy aimed at avoiding schools considered socially unsuitable and harmful, because of the vast presence of students with foreign origins, for the low efficiency of teachers, for lack of extra-curricular activities etc.; the preference goes to safer environments, homogenous and “stimulating�, that could guarantee better possibilities of reproduction and enhancement of the family social capital (ibid). In the case of Umbria-Molise, the fraction is again between Calvairate and the rest of the area: often, kids from Italian families are inscribed to the more central Scuola Media in Via Morosini rather than to the one in Via Monte Velino, even if the latter has very good appliances.

(Following page) Milan, 2017.

Via Ciceri Visconti.

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Subdivision of the the Umbria Molise area in neighbourhoods: Calvairate has a defined name, Tertulliano shows a growing identity, while the area in between is hard to identify under a name.

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services: places and people Observing Umbria-Molise during my surveys, I focused on the way people lived the services present in the area. My point of departure was to interrogate myself upon life in public in ordinary neighbourhoods and to reflect on the various uses that people have of services. But what are services? Dictionaries define a service as “a system supplying a public need such as transport, communications, or utilities such as electricity and water”(). According to my vision of public needs, with “services” I did not mean only the enclosed welfare facilities that dot the city, such as schools and clinics, but also its open public spaces.

In a way, I refer to services as the PGT of Milan does when introducing the concept of Nucleo di Identità Locale (NIL). The latest PGT (Piano di Governo del Territorio), which is the administrative tool in charge of the guidelines of urban development, subdivides the city in different units that, apart from having statistical reasons, define areas that should have a common identity, as the literal translation of their name Nucleus of Local Identity suggests. These identities are strictly connected to services, since NILs also have to reorganise local welfare, and they refer to spaces such as historical centres absorbed in the dense city, concentrations of commercial activities and in open spaces in general. Therefore, the streetscape is intended, in a broader sense, as a service too. This was the approach I had when looking at the neighbourhoods of Umbria-Molise.

I actually found out that Umbria-Molise was the NIL number 28 only later, and realised that I had moved through it with the same motive, paying attention on how people used spaces and gathered in them. However, I tried to go beyond the classical analysis of urban structures: for example, in understanding that Piazzale Martini and Via Ciceri Visconti, even if conceived at the same time and very close one to the other, host very different activities.

Although the observation often confirmed predictable common activities, such as children playing on playgrounds, I could notice the persistence of everyday-life outdoor life and observe the role that proximity has today in certain contexts, especially for certain categories of people. Moreover, I tried to look at real contemporary way of aggregation with no preconceptions and having in mind Cristina Bianchetti’s urban interiors.

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Map of the services in the Umbria-Molise area. Dark blue stands for enclosed services, while light blue represent open spaces.

(Following pages) Axonometric view of Umbria-Molise and identification of its main services.

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piazzale cuoco Piazzale Vincenzo Cuoco is a roundabout between Viale Molise and Viale Puglie, known in the transportation network of the city because of the bus stop of the circular bus line 90/91 and of a few other buses and tramway lines. As many roundabouts in the street system of Milan, it is characterised by vegetation and some devices aimed at creating an area where to stay, although at first sight it is a very unwelcoming space, surrounded by congested roads. Usually, green isolated areas like this one are only attended by people walking their dogs: there is no real reason to go there. However, Piazzale Cuoco is located in a strategic position at one entrance of Parco Alessandrini and, also because of public transportation connections, it is often crossed by people moving from Umbria-Molise towards the park, towards other residential areas or bus stops. It is interesting to notice how this roundabout, that is furnished with some benches, a drinking fountain and a small playground, at some time of the day, is animated by an unexpected number of people, in a configuration that reminds those of Cristina Bianchetti’s urban interiors: many immigrant people, perhaps living in the social housing nearby, gather towards 6/7 pm there to drink alcohol, to play with a ball, or just to sit and relax.

They are mainly men, and sit both on the benches and on the seesaw for some time, before leaving Piazzale Cuoco.

piazza insubria Piazza Insubria is a green square bordered on one side by the social housing complexes of Molise and Calvairate and on the other one by privately owned buildings inhabited by wealthy people. This apparent contrast is mirrored, perhaps unintentionally, in the internal division of the square spaces, showing some tension in the different uses: on the “private� side of the square all the facilities have been installed (playgrounds, skating rings and alleys to play bowls); the opposite one, on the contrary, is less structured and hosts a fenced dog area.

Especially in the afternoons, the square is very crowded and attended by mothers and their children, young men and elderly people. It hosts different activities, including sport sessions, people sitting and drinking alcohol or using their smartphones, chatting or skyping, as well as children playing. It is interesting to notice how the alley conceived to play bowls, designed according to the needs emerged by a participative planning, is actually used by chidren to play football, because elderly people prefer to use alleys in other parks: nowadays table-tennis tables have been installed.

People inhabiting Piazza Insubria are very heterogeneous, but in the majority of non-Italian origins. Therefore, likewise in Via Ciceri Visconti, different habits and ways to stay in public can be observed: on warm evenings, some spontaneous parties are held in the square.

via ciceri visconti Via Laura Ciceri Visconti is a complex open space in between the two larger green squares Piazza Insubria and Piazzale Martini, recently renovated under the public program Contratto di quartiere. Even if in strict connection with them and seemingly a promenade from one to the other one, it is quite independent. In fact, more than a connection north south between the two squares, its space works transversally. It is closed on the northern side by the presence of the public library Calvairate and it is designed in different sections, as to host various activities, which actually it does. The benches under the leafy trees are occupied mainly by elderly or, in the evening, by men of non-Italian origin. The playground is attended by children and their parents in a very informal way: children check their homework with mothers and chat about everyday life. On the benches bordering the paths, instead, people mainly stay alone or in small groups, using their telephones to chat or to call. The eastern side of Via Ciceri Visconti, the one bordered by the social housing complex, is usually quite empty, while the western one, bordered by many shops of different kinds, from a laundrette to a local gelateria, is quite crowded all day long.

As Via Ciceri Visconti is mainly inhabited by people of non-Italian origin, it hosts different practices, in particular related to the way of staying in public: on warm evenings, spaces are often lived until late by families, that sometimes organise little parties too.

piazzale martini Piazzale Ferdinando Martini is the most monumental among the open spaces of Umbria-Molise. It is structured following the landscape rules of the XIX century: a central slightly hilly green area crossed by paths and surrounded by a double row of plane trees. On Wednesday mornings, this tree-lined promenade hosts a very crowded local market, which stretches towards Via Ciceri Visconti too. However, on normal weekdays, it is used as a double-sided parking. Elderly people, often accompanied by their caregivers, move around it slowly, through parked cars, especially in the mornings. Even if more relevant landscape-wise, Piazzale Martini is less attended than other open spaces of Umbria-Molise. The two opposite playgrounds are used in the afternoons by children, but they are evidently less crowded than those of Piazza Insubria. The actual park is always quite empty apart from someone lying on the grass. People like to sit on the benches along the pathways, in small groups or alone, to talk, to skype or to listen to music. Some people walk their dogs in the assigned areas. At nights, at certain corners youngsters stay in group and chill out.

giardini candia Giardini Marcello Candia are public gardens on the lower border of Umbria-Molise, right next to the railway walled boundary. At first sight, they seem to be the private gardens of three 8-floor residential buildings set around them and with the green directly facing their balconies. They are instead public fenced gardens, recently realised, with young vegetation and serviced by two playgrounds. Because of their closeness to the Porta Romana railway station, they are often crossed by people going towards the station or in the direction of Tertulliano neighbourhood. Moreover, as they are the only green open space of the lower part of UmbriaMolise, they are a point of reference for the inhabitants of the area: many elderly people walk there to sit on the benches in the morning, while in the afternoon they are literally invaded by children. Giardini Marcello Candia are in fact popular not only among the children living in the close surroundings, but also among children of parents who prefer to attend what they consider a safer environment in respect to the other green squares of Umbria-Molise. Safer, both in the physical sense - as the gardens are fenced - as in the social sense - as they are frequented by white Italian people. In the evening, many runners, of different ages, go jogging in the park, while in the early evenings some youngsters chill out, but not later than 11 pm, the time when the gardens close.

calvairate library The Calvairate library is an isolated building in via Ciceri Visconti facing Piazzale Martini.

Although located in a strategic hinge point, the library seems not to establish any relationship with its surroundings: it is in fact fenced and enclosed by dense vegetation. Moreover, its entrance is hidden behind a parking lane that blocks a visual connection from the street. As for the building in itself, it is a prefabricated one-floor structure from the ’70s, very simple and aged, which reminds of a temporary solution. The interior is essential and it is articulated in two main areas: one used as an auditorium and one as a reading and studying area. The latter is then subdivided again into a children’s sector, a computer area and a study space furnished with tables. On the southern side of the library, an outdoor space allows users to stay in the open air. The people that attend Calvairate library are various: among the others, the elderly who want to read newspapers, high school students doing their homework or mothers with children. Because of the presence of the auditorium, exhibitions and meetings are hosted in the library too, among which those organised by Municipio 4.

oratorio The local oratorio is a polyfunctional space of reference for the parrocchie of San Pio V and Santa Maria di Calvairate. It is a very introverted space, which does not define any relationship with the streetscape. It is part of a block and, at first sight, it is not recognisable from the outside. It hosts different spaces and different activities. First of all, it has rooms for extra scholastic activities, mainly related to catechism. Secondly, it is equipped with a football field and a basketball court. Thirdly, it has an auditorium that is used as theatre and cinema too, called Teatro Oscar. Altogether, the oratorio is an important place of reference for the local community, especially children and the elderly.

einstein secondary school The Liceo Scientifico Einstein, together with its symmetric Istituto Tecnico Verri, occupies an entire block located in the Tertualliano area. The building is mostly detached from the street border and therefore creates different kinds of internal open spaces: only the main entrance, the auditorium and the gym touch the perimeter. The whole area of pertinence is fenced, but there are no visual barriers, since vegetation is not used to separate private spaces from the outside.

During school hours, the only open spaces used by students are those occupied by sport facilities; the secondary entrance, which is also the main one to the auditorium, is mostly used as a car park.

Similarly, in the afternoon, the use of open spaces is limited to the surroundings of the gym. The school, in fact, rents out some of its spaces to private associations for extra-curriculum activities, and the gym is one of the most requested. Because of the lack of areas where to relax, teenagers and children usually wait and talk on the sidewalk.

urban transformations When looking at a map of Umbria-Molise, or when walking through this part of the city, attention is usually brought to the presence of a relevant system of open spaces: Piazzale Martini, Via Ciceri Visconti and Piazza Insubria. It seems natural to look at these green open spaces, reminding us of a XIX century design of the city, perhaps because that historic point of view is still firmly present in our way to address a dense urban pattern.

However, this part of the city was not planned altogether and, besides, it was urbanised in more recent times. At the beginning of the XX century Calvairate was still an agricultural village, known mainly for the presence of a church consecrated to Santa Maria Nascente on the historical road from Linate to Milano. Nonetheless, the 1884 Beruto urban plan did not consider this village relevant nor its heritage and in 1929, contemporarily to the construction of the nearby new slaughterhouse, it was demolished to give space to a new social housing complex, later called Calvairate, as already written. On this occasion Piazzale Martini and Via Ciceri Visconti were planned too. Both the design of the fascist social housing project and of the open spaces in front of it were inspired to an aesthetic very much related to the previous century approach to the city. Piazza Insubria, instead, was conceived only after the second world war, even if in close relationship with the other two green open spaces. In general, the whole urban configuration of Umbria-Molise belongs to this period when most of nowadays housing was built. Not only Piazza Insubria was planned, but also Piazza Imperatore Tito and Piazza Salgari: the latter two are widenings to the main commercial streets of the neighbourhood. They were, and still are, mainly dedicated to circulation and characterised by a commercial use of the bordering buildings’ ground floors.

If open spaces are quite articulated in the upper part of Umbria-Molise, they are almost inexistent in its lower part. In fact, the area closer to Porta Romana railway station had been destined to industrial activities for a long time: since the early XX century, the presence of the railway encouraged the settlement of factories in its surroundings because it enhanced the possibilities of goods transportation. Likewise many other industrial areas, the space was pragmatically subdivided so as to strengthen the production

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aim. The lack of public open spaces in this part of Umbria-Molise was also accentuated by the ’70s/’80s general trend of interiorization of green spaces, coinciding with the beginning of the deindustrialization process.

Many of the new residential buildings erected in that period in place of previous factories consisted of isolated edifices on fenced private gardens, which had no connection with the streetscape. Nowadays the only green open space of Tertulliano neighbourhood is Giardini Marcello Candia, which is a quite recent public fenced garden, realised in the late ’90s as part of an industrial site reconversion to residential buildings, probably as a concession fee.

While many factories were converted to residential wealthy buildings, some of them were bought or rented by architectural and design firms, which found the cheap and rough industrial heritage fitting their needs. In recent times, this newly settled creative class has addressed the loss of relevance of the street space to promoting a contemporary form of brandization and re-appropriation of public space in the Tertulliano neighbourhood.

In 2011, they grouped under the name NIL28, recalling the Nucleo di Identità Locale they are part of - which actually is much broader - and they decided to promote their neighbourhood on the occasion of the Fuorisalone, which is the whole of side events related to the Milan Furniture Fair. Fuorisalone is an opportunity to visit and live the city in all of its unexpected spaces.

NIL28, including firms such as Baukuh, Salottobuono, Consalez-Rossi (Left) Milan, 2017.

Piazzale Insubria and Calvairate social housing.

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(Right) 1936 map. Presence of the social housing complexes and of Piazzale Martini; developing industries in between Porta Vittoria and Porta Romana.

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Architects and Metrogamma, proposed to take over Via Cadolini for one day, occupying it for an afternoon dinner opened to all residents: a long artisanal table to socialise and to eat together.

In 2012 the group agreed to participate again at Fuorisalone, but this time with an event of bigger resonance. Using the opportunity given by a rise of discontent towards the decision of building in Via Einstein a new student residence for Politecnico di Milano, NIL28 promoted a reflexion upon the role of fences and borders in contemporary cities. The event consisted in a series of participative activities held in Via Einstein, associated with the symbolic act of breaking the fence of the soon-to-be student house site and cutting the fallow grass towards a clearing which hosted interviews with relevant people.

On the wave of the success of this initiative, NIL28 tried to promote a broader action in view of the event of Milano Expo 2015, aiming at creating an image for the neighbourhood inspired by the GWL neighbourhood in Amsterdam and Vauban in Freiburg, Germany. However, with no real support by the Council, no more events have been organised since then.

While deindustrialisation was bringing on one hand these social changes and transformations around via Tertulliano, on the other hand it was causing in Calvairate a deepening of social divisions and conflicts: the changes in social structures that inhabitants of the social housing complexes were undergoing affected the neighbourhood equilibrium. Therefore, in (Left) Milan, 2011.

NIL28 event within the Fuorisalone context.

(Right) 1966 map. Development of an industrial cluster in the Tertulliano area. Definition of the open spaces of the area.

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2004, the Council decided to sign a Contratto di quartiere to promote an upgrading of its services and facilities, with special attention to the topic of integration between people living in social housing and the rest of the neighbourhood. Contratto di quartiere, literally “Neighbourhood Contract”, is a program aimed at the regeneration of public housing estates that provides an integrated and area based action, involving the participation of the inhabitants and local actors. In the case of Calvairate, it aimed at addressing both the social dimension and the physical one. As for social actions, it increased services and support for the elderly, people affected by mental problems, juveniles and families with foreign origins; moreover, it promoted projects to support the creation of new connections among the residents. Regarding the actions affecting the physical space of everyday life, different approaches were adopted: on one hand the restoration of the buildings facades, on the other one the reorganization of the street section, of parking spots and of the public spaces of Via Ciceri Visconti.

(Left) Milan, 2017.

Requalification of the street section according to “Contratto di Quartiere”.

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(Right) 1973 map. Development of fenced-block typologies in the Tertulliano area.

Construction of the library.

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crossing fences

borders and public space Umbria-Molise area is structured in a series of spaces that could be considered, in a broader sense, services to inhabitants. These spaces, which are both open and closed environments, vary in practices and, therefore, in times of use too. Bernardo Secchi, in a 1986-essay published on Casabella, expresses his concern on the fact that the spaces composing the city were primarily defined by their borders rather than by their internal characteristics (Secchi, 1986) and, as a consequence, different centres, schools, hospitals or services could be identified by the mechanical sign of a hatch (ibid). He addresses a need for a better comprehension and representation of urban public spaces, following the path that emerged since Gian Battista Nolli in 1748 drew a map of Rome based on the concept of accessibility of spaces. This map put in relation the classical external street public space and certain internal spaces, such as churches, often related to the services of that time.

Trying to apply a similar approach to the context of Umbria-Molise, we would face some issues. First of all, the need of representing different maps for different times of the day, so as to take into account a broader spectrum of practices. Secondly, the need to represent the different kinds of buffer spaces in distinct ways: thresholds related to commercial functions, such as shops of various kinds, differ from spaces of pertinence of enclosed services, such as school yards and library gardens.

The picture resulting from an analysis like this goes far beyond the simple mapping of services. It tries instead to observe an urban area from the point of view of the constitution of the urban ground (Secchi, 1986) and to read it through the articulation of the different collective and private spaces (ibid).

It is possible to notice, in fact, how some streets expand and commercial squares gain a more significant weight in the urban image. Moreover, some fenced blocks display a relevant potential increase of uses. A new map comes up, showing not only more complex environments but also their articulation and potentiality.

In Secchi’s opinion, the qualification of urban spaces requires to shift attention from the architectural fabric to the design of the ground, which

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means to focus on that surface which is shared by more buildings, and which cannot be reduced to a pure technical space (Secchi, 1986). He also adds that the quality of urban spaces is proportional to their articulation (ibid): urban spaces should mirror the complexity of their surroundings and communicate with the practices taking place in them. In Secchi’s words, by being under articulated, [the urban space] can hinder the correct functioning of activities; it can interrupt points of contact (ibid).

Therefore, so as to enhance new forms of contact, the relationship between internal and external spaces in the urban context, as well as their potential practices, need to be taken into account. The starting point of a design proposal should thus be the visible and morphological characters of space, especially those related to the ground.

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via Einstein, the context Among the various spaces that could trigger new dynamics of contact in the Umbria-Molise area, or that could be subjected to qualifying projects, I selected the context of via Einstein, a secondary street in the Tertulliano neighbourhood. Although partly an arbitrary choice, this street brings up some relevant questions. Firstly, it is located in a part of the city characterised by the massive presence of fences. As we have previously observed, the conversion of the industrial urban fabric to a residential one during the ’70s and ’80s drove us to the definition of very privatised spaces: apart from Giardini Candia, no open public space is present in the area. Secondly, via Einstein is enclosed on one side by a school block and, on the other one, a new university student house is under construction. I therefore decided to work on a context in relation with the public domain, rather than focusing on a private-public interaction.

The two high schools Liceo Einstein and Istituto Verri are mainly detached from the street border, which is fenced with a continuous railing. Even though visually permeable and mainly green, the block is unaccusable.

Instead of transmitting an airy sensation, the distance between the street and the buildings accentuates the interiorised character of the latters.

Moreover, the green areas between the fence and the schools are unused because of their low quality resulting in an uncomfortable space: there is not much interaction with the surroundings, except for the presence of sports facilities used not only in the morning but in the afternoons too.

On the opposite side, a Politecnico di Milano student house is under construction, on a site where a middle school was demolished for the presence of asbestos. Partly financed by the Milanese institution and partly by the Ministry of Education, the project of the student house aims at the creation of a space open to the neighbourhood. According to the project drawings, therefore, the building is backwarded from the street border, giving space to flowerbeds and benches. Also, an introverted slice of the site is accessible during daytime to everybody and equipped with playgrounds and green areas. As for the building in itself, the program envisages a public space open to residents, even if, looking at the design drawings, the space devoted to this does not seem much.

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Overall, via Einstein results to be a parking space in its current condition: not busy at all, the main character that defines it is the presence of parking lots. The schools block does not empower the street of new attributes; furthermore, the opportunity of the project for a student house could easily end up being another fenced space in the Tertulliano context. In fact, the treatment of its ground floor does not seem to communicate with the streetscape; the flowerbeds at the entrance remind us much of the interventions that have affected ordinary spaces until now; the choice of placing the playgrounds and the spaces open to the neighbourhood in an interiorised area seems questionable too.

Milan, 2017.

Einstein secondary school.

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stretching floorings The design proposal aims at the articulation of via Einstein, having in mind Norberg-Shultz definition of places, made up of concrete things that have material substance, shape, texture and colour (Norberg-Shulz, 1976). In between the interiorization process and the space of flows (Castells, 1996), the project site becomes an orientation point in the ordinary city: it does not enter the nodal urban network dimension, but turns it into a space of contact for the inhabitants of the neighbourhood. Because of the changing relationship between community making and neighbourhoods, the proposal tries to trigger contacts that do not necessarily have to be profound. Rather, it promotes an environment where people can see and recognise each other, gather in groups or stay alone.

Moving from the physical context, the main intention is to address the current flattened asphalt streetscape and to work on the threshold it generates when meeting the schools and student dorm borders, which nowadays are a barrier strongly dividing interior and exterior environments. In doing so, the proposal wants to enhance shared uses of the space, in accordance with the national guidelines for a more accessible and open school.

The strategy consists firstly in an intervention on the program of certain parts of the buildings, both existing and up-to-come, so as to provide spaces suitable for the inhabitants’ needs, and to promote a more continuous use of them. In parallel, it concerns a physical action through small changes able to modify the perception of the space. As to make an example, facades are visually opened with bigger windows, some fences removed and continuous floorings between interiors and exteriors are placed, so as to bring some of the newly enabled activities in the public domain too and to explode in a way some of the school functions. When working on the limit between enclosed and open, domestic and public spaces, both the concept of the designed chambre à ciel ouvert and the more spontaneous one of urban interior come up: the strategy chosen does not stick to one path, but tries to face the way people stay in public with reference to the intimité and extimité dimensions.

Via Einstein, then, is pedestrianized, except for a lane allowing the entrance

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to residents; the asphalt is replaced by a standard cobblestone, eaten up by the interior/exterior pavings generated by the new interactions between buildings.

The entrances, both to the two symmetric high schools and to the student dorm, are underlined by specific floorings. In the case of the dorm, the faรงade is also opened and the internal space is freed of non-structural partitions, so as to provide a more welcoming environment.

The existing school spaces of the gym and of the auditorium are improved and put directly in relationship with the external space through the removal of unnecessary fences. As for the auditorium, for example, whose entrance is now a secondary access facing an internal paved area used as a car and a bicycle park, a new connection with the street answers to a naturally extroverted vocation.

The school garden, then, breaks through the street, while the necessary school fence is drawn back: the stretching ground hosts a playground and a resting area, which is moved from the introverted space behind the student house to the pedestrian street.

Furthermore, some new functions are added. One wing of the school facing the street, currently used as deposit, is turned into an internal cafeteria for the students in the mornings and as a reading room during the rest of the day, opened to the students of the dorm too. Finally, the ground floor of the student dorm is equipped with a bigger dining area, which enables an outdoor use of the space too.

Vegetation follows the floorings in specific ways according to their characteristics, sometimes in a more regular pattern and other times in a more spontaneous disposition.

As a result, via Einstein is beaten up by these continuous floors that enter the public sphere with their features and their specificities. They get close but never touch, as if the street remained a street, just empowered by new relationships with the context and with what happens in the bordering ground floors.

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conclusions At the end of this investigation on urban ordinary spaces, it is possible to affirm that the addressed areas have not to be considered as a flattened and mostly uneventful side effect to the broader development of cities.

They are instead complex spaces that participate in the composition of the contemporary city in a coherent and modern way. Up-to-date analysis show how residential ordinary areas cannot be categorised anymore as neighbourhoods in their historical sense: they have evolved, losing some of their classical characteristics and, at the same time, gaining new ones.

Contemporary neighbourhoods, for example, might not create a sense of community any longer but still host relationships related to proximity, which are relevant in everyday lives since frequent contacts happen within the sphere of proximity. Contacts, whether meaningful or light, need a space where to take place: the ordinary areas of the city promote a cohabitation that does not have to necessarily end up in an animated city aiming at an ideal mixitĂŠ and fraternal acceptance. On the contrary, they show the complexity of life in public, taking into consideration the personal dimensions of intimitĂŠ and extimitĂŠ (Bianchetti, 2015).

Ordinary spaces, spazi comuni (Di Giovanni, 2009), which are often losing their complexity and capacity to give space to practices, have to be addressed through specific urban projects, so as to uncover the static image that has been lowered on them. Only through the expression of the layers that compose that image, only through the qualification of the physical spaces, only through the design of a ground able to show the practices taking place on it, it is possible to act on the trivialised space that characterises the ordinary city. That does not mean to go back to a historical model of neighbourhoods, or to give up to the contemporary processes of privatisation and interiorization. It means instead to recognise where the historic complexity has been lost and try to propose a modern

relationship between internal and external spaces. Design projects should therefore try to explore the threshold of the spaces that define everydaylife places, recognising the concept of privacy. Furthermore, they should permit, or at least see, even in a light way, the interaction among the “urban tribes� that structure the current social archipelago.

Services, which are spread on the urban context, are the reference points through which interpret the ordinary city; the way we have intended them throughout this thesis, they relate both to the traditional closed environments and to the open public ones. Sometimes in contact with commercial spaces, sometimes isolated, they compose the orientation system of a city with no monuments. The actions aimed at their improvement should try to avoid the development of new forms of separations and to exacerbate the privatisation of spaces. On the contrary, they should attempt to understand the different nuances of existing uses and to enhance possible future ones, while providing a background or a stage for them. Under this point of view, public actions play a significant role, since services are mainly public domain; moreover, they have the responsibility to supervise the physical outcome of the projects, so as to avoid that good intentions would be lost in their realization.

The resulting panorama of ordinary spaces is then complex and heterogeneous: it evidently does not correspond to a generic city.

Residential urban ordinary spaces are the other side of the coin to the stronger network of urban centralities. On one hand, the structure of nodes, communicating at different speeds, has a certain language, which can be defined for example by the concept of heterotopias. On the other hand, the ordinary city talks a less structured language, all focused on a qualitative side, made of interventions on library gardens, on supermarket parking or on school yards. Recognising the potentiality of places scattered around the city where different contacts happen is an opportunity to get in touch with a part of people’s needs usually overlooked, since not belonging to the main image of our time.

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ringraziamenti Un ringraziamento a Massimo Bricocoli, che ha creduto in quello che pensavo e che mi ha seguito e guidato attentamente nel perscorso di tesi; a Cristina Bianchetti, puntuale e critica nelle osservazioni, sempre costruttive; a Matilde Cassani e Paola Sturla, per il supporto progettuale.

Inoltre, un ringraziamento ai miei genitori, che mi hanno sostenuto in questo percorso; a Francesca, Ginevra, Martina, Paolo e Valeria, che sono stati, volenti o nolenti, miei compagni di gruppo acquisiti; ad Anna e Chiara, che hanno ascoltato ore di mie note vocali; ad Enrico, per il supporto finale.