A vulnerable urban context

Piazzale Loreto is located in the northeastern quadrant of Milan, on the ancient trace of the city walls, and is nowadays well embedded in the consolidated town. The surrounding urban fabric is dense and diverse. On the northeastern side of the square is a working-class neighborhood, historically the migrants’ arrival neighborhood of the city (Barra, 2022). In fact, it is the only area in Milan presenting a concentration of private rental housing, while other concentrations of rental housing are in public districts whose access depends on requirements of legal and prolonged residency. Here, housing is relatively affordable but at the same time precarious, often presenting overcrowding, informal tenure, and lack of maintenance (Pacchi, 2021). The neighborhood, named after its main street, “Via Padova”, is well known for its multicultural environment, manifesting with its population’s multinational origins and a myriad of ethnic shops and restaurants. It presents diffused poverty situations and is highly stigmatized due to its poor material condition and social hardship. “Via Padova” is also animated by a flourishing local community promoting solidarity initiatives, cross-cultural events, and active citizenship to supply the local population’s basic material and immaterial needs (access to goods, education, and other essential services). By contrast, on the north-western side of the square is a neighborhood that historically shares a similar trajectory and social composition with the “Via Padova” neighborhood but that, in the last decade, has been subject to an ongoing gentrification process. Since the early 2010s, the neighborhood underwent an intense process of rebranding and placemaking that brought the administration to change its toponym in 2019^[1]: it became “NoLo” (North of Loreto), mimicking the name of gentrified areas in other western contexts (e.g., the well-known case of SoHo in New York). A younger and wealthier population arrived in “NoLo”, which in the span of 10 years saw a visible transformation in typologies of businesses and their customers, with the property values increasing and the displacement of long-term resident populations.

Weaponizing environmental concerns: the concept of Green Gentrification

In this vulnerable context, already characterized by uneven expulsion processes and socio-economic insecurity, the redevelopment of Piazzale Loreto as a green urban amenity will presumably broadly impact the local community. A growing community of scholars is questioning urban initiatives for environmental sustainability from a social justice perspective, highlighting their tendency to increase spatial inequality. Research on “Green Gentrification” explores how greening projects can lead to increased property values, the arrival of wealthier residents, and, ultimately, the displacement of long-time lower-income communities (Gould & Lewis, 2016). Early studies on the topic highlighted how urban growth coalitions appropriate the success of political discourse of environmental justice movements to promote high-end development (Checker, 2011). The environmental sustainability argument is an apparently neutral – or even progressive – concept and an ostensibly desirable scenario to create consensus around campaigns of exclusionary urban redevelopment. In previous phases of neoliberal urbanization, the concepts of obsolescence and decay were used to justify redevelopment and value extraction (Weber, 2002) while exacerbating existing territorial inequalities. Similarly, today, the urge to contrast the climate crises and modernize non-energy-efficient urban environments paves the way for the attraction of capital investments in the area, with little concern for the future of the current inhabitants. In the surroundings of Piazzale Loreto, it is possible to observe a significant concentration of diffused urban transformations in the last years^[2]. Typically, former warehouses or small buildings are torn down and rebuilt as residential spaces for the middle and upper classes. The theory of the “Green Gentrification Cycle” (Rigolon & Collins, 2023) can help to explain and forecast what could happen in the case of the LOC project in relation to the neighborhood of Via Padova and NoLo. The theory argues that gentrification can both precede and follow a greening initiative. In our case, the Municipality of Milan prioritized the greening of a square in an already gentrifying low-income community, with the expected result of intensifying the property value increase.

Missing tenant protection measures

To this day, the Municipality has not established any protective measure to contrast or counterbalance the potential negative effects on the vulnerable residents and housing affordability, nor has it considered evaluating such policy intervention. There is not a single statement from the mayor or public officials that takes into account the local community’s concerns about the intensification of gentrification and displacement. This, in all likelihood, will happen, considering the scientific literature on the subject and the affirmations of intentions in the project documents themselves. LOC’s website refers ambiguously to the issue of value increase, referring to “a space […] to restore the neighborhood value” and to “a partnership that multiplies values”. The technical documents are even more precise in defining the economic returns of the LOC investment on existing material assets of more than €196,000,000^[3] and connecting the property value increase as “determined by the planners’ focus on a real estate development sensitive to the sustainability of construction choices and forward-looking the temporal extent of positive returns^[4]”. The document also cites international studies to prove how transformations attentive to the landscape can increase property value by 20 percent. A part of the community, the property owners, will benefit greatly from this increase, as all the investors who accumulated properties in the area due to the low prices compared to other areas of Milan. But what about the many renters who currently inhabit the neighborhood, how the project will impact their lives?

The Community rhetoric

The local community is central to the rhetoric of the project. The regeneration of Piazzale Loreto is presented as an occasion for the local community to thrive, as symbolized by the name of the project “LOC – Loreto Open Community”. Besides that, the community remains an evocative ideal in the project documents. They refer to the local community as a homogeneous body of stakeholders that “will converge within the LOC square, helping to bring it to life and generate social value”^[5]. After the project’s approval, the team established a participatory process to follow the start of the work, presenting the project and collecting feedback from citizens. They opened an informative office on the site, LOC2026 Hub. Its activities lie in the tokenism area of Sherry Arnstein’s ladder of participation (Arnstein, 1969/2020), with a prevailing informative function, if not venting and consolation for angry residents, especially car drivers, worried about the loss of parking and effects on vehicular fluxes^[6]. The participation campaign reached the elderly and wealthier inhabitants and promoted various environmental awareness activities with the local schools, but it did not have great success in activating the migrants or connecting with the most vulnerable populations. The residents’ feedback contributed to slightly adjusting some minor aspects of the final project. However, before the project submission, during the design phase, the team consulted with local associations that expressed an interest in focusing on the issue of historical memory in the redevelopment of the square. There is no trace of this aspect in the approved project.

The project, while deploying an imagination oriented to the promise of better future scenarios for all, from an environmental, social, and livability point of view, fails to question the actual accessibility of the project area in the future. If not adequately addressed, the expected increase in property values will cause long-term and current residents displacement, excluding them from the renewed space enjoyment. I argue that no redevelopment project should be undertaken without a previous, serious engagement with policy and measures to mitigate its effects on property values. The involvement of global actors and stakeholders, including the multinational company that will become the new de facto owner of the public space, reveals a multi-scalarity of interests that risk overlooking the local needs. Is the Municipality protecting the general public interest, or is it prioritizing a particular set of interests? Are the principle of equity and the collective value of the city a priority for the administration?

Bibliography

Arnstein, Sherry. “A Ladder of Citizen Participation”: Journal of the American Institute of Planners (1969).” In The City Reader, pp. 290-302. Routledge, 2020.

Barra, D. (2022). Via Padova. Nascita di una periferia milanese. 1900-1926. Milieu.

Checker. M. (2011). Wiped out by the “greenwave”: Environmental gentrification and the paradoxical politics of urban sustainability. City & Society 23(2): 210–229.

Gould, K., & Lewis, T. (2016). Green gentrification: Urban sustainability and the struggle for environmental justice. Routledge.

Pacchi, C. (2021). Latent tensions and urban change in two Milan neighbourhoods. Spatial Tensions in Urban Design: Understanding Contemporary Urban Phenomena, 53-61.

Rigolon, A., & Collins, T. (2023). The green gentrification cycle. Urban Studies, 60(4), 770-785.

Weber, R. (2002). Extracting value from the city: neoliberalism and urban redevelopment. Antipode, 34(3), 519-540.

^[1] Newspaper article: 02/18/2019, Nasce ufficialmente NoLo: ok del Comune ai nuovi nomi dei quartieri di Milano, La Repubblica, last retrieved 12/12/2024. 

^[2] Facebook: 07/01/2023, Community mapping of the urban renewal projects in the area realized by a group of activists active on housing issues, Abitare Via Padova, last retrieved 12/12/2024. 

^[3] From page 42 of the “Technical project report” available on the Municipality of Milan website, last retrieved 12/12/2024. 

^[4] Ibidem, page 27.

^[5] Ibidem, page 33.

^[6] Information discussed during a project presentation meeting in February 2024 with a representative of the firm that conducted the participatory process.