New Way of Designing City
How to design an innovative identity for Piazza Tripoli
26, March, 2020.
Time seems to have stopped, catapulting us inside an episode of the television series “The Walking Dead”. Everyone’s holed up inside their own homes, running away from the Covid-19 pandemic, a pandemic that turns people’s lives upside down by putting them to the test, some with proven illness and some with rent and bills to pay, without any certainty about work and the future.
Those in a situation of fragility are also the students, forced to work from home, with the aim of carrying out a programme of study, which, without the help and support of university teachers, would be abandoned to itself. This is a very difficult test to face, especially considering that some faculties of university have the development of workshops done by a working group, where different ethnicities, traditions and cultures come together to realize an interior design project.
This is the case of the course “New interiors 2” of the faculty of the Milan’s Polytechnic, address “Interior and spatial Design” of which the Team n°8 is part. The team consists of: Reehanul Karim Ashraf Ali, Pierluigi Angelo De Pace, Miriam Ganci, Elisabetta Ralli and Sobhana Suriyaprakash.
The aim of the course is to carry out urban interventions in some districts of Milan. Yes, it may seems a bit strange as a theme, especially considering that students are Interior Design, but the knowledge acquired during our study (thanks to the same Polytechnic of Milan, or thanks to other faculties) allows us to realize projects that go beyond four simple domestic walls. The walls can be considered as a limit that our mind sets to circumscribe a space; nothing, in fact, prevents us from thinking that a perimeter can consist of a set of trees, or a series of roads.
As we said, our goal is, therefore, to give new light to spaces that, over the years, have lost it because abandoned by public institutions, or spaces that have not managed to earn an identity able to represent local communities.
At first, we felt stranded: what should we have achieved? Of course, a new road with better signs can improve the traffic of cars or motorcycles, but is this really, what we need to do?
Initially, we were asked to do a first research on the different types of urban interventions such as tactical urbanism and placemaking. What we have discovered is that you don’t need major infrastructure interventions to change the look of a place, sometimes we need just a brush of colour to revive that flame that, over time, has gone increasingly extinguished.
Once the research was completed and we understood the new design techniques, we chose our project site, based on the suggestions that the space communicated to us. For this reason, we welcomed the idea of using our creative minds to help the local community of Piazzale Tripoli, a square surrounded by the green city near the neighbourhood De Angeli — Bande Nere.
We have thus begun the first phase of planning, which is the one based on the study of space from the “quantitative” and “qualitative” point of view. Given the impossibility to visit the place and the desire to involve the local population, we were put in contact with two citizens and an architect close to the community.
Organizing a video call on the digital platform Microsoft teams, we had a chat with the above-mentioned protagonists, who lent themselves to tell us the past and the present of their neighbourhood.
Piazza Tripoli is located within a large space on the border between zone 6 and zone 7 of the city of Milan and this leads it to be classified as a “non-area”, as little considered by the town hall and the rest of the citizens. We discover to have been a fertile ground for the birth of large and important factories of the twentieth century, like the printing shop De Angeli, and residential area for the hundred workers who moved to look for work. Over the years, the neighbourhood continues to maintain its identity as a residential district, but industries gradually cease to exist.
We also discover that the Piazzale Tripoli parking lot is dedicated to the Nobel Peace Prize winner Yitzhak Rabin, former Prime Minister of the State of Israel. Yes, because at the end of the Second World War a small Jewish community entered the territory of Milan, immediately establishing good relations with the population. It is thanks to them that there is a school complex that covers the entire cycle of study still in operation today.
Deepening the discussion, we learn that the square is considered as “street”. Street, that is a place of passage and not rest, as we should have expected. It seems that this is one of the main reasons why, within the park, no structural interventions are carried out to make the environment more harmonious and liveable. “Very strange indeed”.
Yet the presence of schools should make us think that there is a space where parents can leave free to play their children, a safe and well cared for by the public administration. With a heavy heart, the two citizens want to point out that the square is not equipped with a good lighting system: there is only a street lamp in the middle of the parking lot.
Fortunately, the area presents itself alive from the point of view of the bars, pubs that keep the residents and also the people passing through.
The next phase of our study was to analyse the neighbourhood from the point of view of services, transport and real estate. The research has been undertaken by acquiring, from the Geoportal of Milan, the files needed to build our personalized map. Their elaboration has been carried on, in parallel, with the use of Google Earth and Google Maps, which have helped us to identify the green spaces surrounding the area and the metro stops, trams and buses used by the population to move around the city of Milan.
What emerges from our interview and our investigations is, above all, the lack of a single identity, which instead shows itself as fragmented just like the park, divided into sectors disconnected from each other.
The desire of citizens to get involved, to literally take to the streets to give a new identity to the neighbourhood, to create a space where people of all ages can spend time in peace and security is for us the most important stimulus that drives us to experience a road never undertaken.
Team #8: Reehanul Karim Ashraf Ali, Pierluigi Angelo De Pace, Miriam Ganci, Elisabetta Ralli and Sobhana Suriyaprakash
