Milano dreams big style – and dreams in “green” – by working to improve the city’s public spaces in a way that is innovative and environmentally sustainable.
…by landscaping new parks and green spaces designed to confer greater harmony to people’s leisure time, life in the open air, outdoor sports and educational experiences.
…by starting out from the new district next to Mind – the innovation district already dubbed as the new Italian Silicon Valley – where the construction of an innovative residential format is already underway, with the accent rigorously placed on “green life”, located between urban vegetable gardens and the commercial spaces of a future light mobility precinct for self-driving vehicles. A 300,000 sq m park has already requalified the area, while work is due to start next spring on the largest school built in Milan in the last 30 years, designed to offer modern teaching methods and outdoor spaces, comprising teaching gardens and orchards.
This line of action is wholeheartedly backed by Mayor Beppe Sala, who took part in the latest Milano Green Forum – the most important international event on the environment – to announce the burgeoning of new sustainable projects in the city, such as “ForestaMi”, in other words the planting of 3 million trees all over the metropolitan area within 2030.
However, the activities already deployed to make the fashion and design capital a more smart and eco-friendly place are numerous and variegated, from the “smoke free” revolution of the new municipal air quality directive – which, starting from 1 January 2021, prohibits outdoor smoking apart from in isolated places, to safeguard people’s health and reduce pollutants – to the ban placed on diesel oil boilers used for heating buildings.
While Piazza Sant’Agostino, in the district of San Vittore, and Piazzale Archinto, in the Isola district, have been revamped with flowerbeds and gardens, complete with benches, playgrounds and leisure spaces, an overall asphalted surface area of 27,000 square metres has been re-greened in recent months, with beneficial effects on the urban microclimate and biodiversity.
Even those neighbourhoods known for their lively nightlife are all set to join the new ecological course, thanks to a collaboration between the Milan Municipality and the company Fineco in the ambit of a project called “Adopt and take care of public vegetation” consisting in the distribution of more than 500 plants – including herbaceous plants and century-old olive trees – and the maintenance of all the damaged areas comprised between Corso Como, Corso Garibaldi and Largo Foppa.
Furthermore, in the next few weeks, new zero impact eco bus shelters, entirely powered by solar energy, will be installed at 60 different points in the city (the first of which has just been set up in Via Bagarotti, in the Valsesia district) as part of an Atm project aimed at making public transport more efficient and comfortable, while a maxi pedestrian precinct will be created between San Babila and Largo Augusto: consequently, Corso Europa, Via Verziere and Largo Toscanini will be lined with trees and closed to traffic, for the joy of cyclists and pedestrians, as part of the municipal project known as Piano Quartieri.
The green revolution is called “urban forestation” and is just at the outset. To improve the life quality of the city’s inhabitants and tourists by redesigning public spaces. To make Milan even more beautiful, enjoyable and avant-garde.
