The New Habitats of the Milanese Area: Reflections on a Regional Rail Transport System by Agata Bazzi

Notes on the Study

The presentation takes as its starting point a study entitled Il territorio delle Ferrovie Nord Milano, morfologie, tendenze, progetti (The Territory of the Ferrovie North Milano: Morphologies, Trends, Projects), born out of two orders of problems:

the technological adaptation of the Ferrovie Nord to new demands: the need for more trains, more stops, faster service;
the desire that the railway infrastructure will no longer be perceived as a 'cut' through the urban fabric, interrupting the dynamics at the local scale in the areas it crosses and privileging the main city.

The study was commissioned by the users of the train system itself, represented by a specially formed consortium of the local public authorities. The fact that it is the users of the transportation system - and not its builders and operators - who have raised these problems, has a substantial impact on the answers given. One question for the workshop is, therefore, the effect this has on our analysis and understanding of the region: which findings of the study are most relevant to this specific context and which are more broadly applicable.

My role in the working group was related to the planning aspects of the study, rather than the architectural development of the more important station-nodes. From this standpoint, the problem addressed has from the outset been of a double nature:

to understand what was actually 'cut' by the railway line (evidently not just a set of single places, which could be resolved at the architectural scale through "bridge stations"), which means understanding the deeper nature of the territory, what it was and what it will be;
to understand the complex relation between territory at the wider scale and the identity of single places, so as to provide solutions at both the regional and local levels; this aims to develop a method for integrating the duality of a transport system and its field of action.

The Culture of the Diffused City

"Culture is a symbolic system which transfers physical reality into
experienced reality." (Dorothy Lee)

In order to relate the above mentioned study to the central theme of the workshop - traffic culture - I would like to focus on the "what" question, concerning the nature of the territory of the Milanese metropolitan area, a low-density urban fabric extended over a wide region. I will call this kind of territory the Diffused City.

The Diffused City is characterized by its functional and productive autonomy from the "central city, in that from every point there is access to services of the same qualities as in a city: a consistent urban-level territorial "performance". Production of goods and services is based on local networks, for which the principal urban node simply constitutes a "gateway" for national and international distribution. Single-family housing units satisfy a desire for a better relation to nature, better health and greater symbolic coherence.

The Diffused City is mainly based on private automobile transportation. Public transportation systems only work if they are conceived as a network interconnecting different regional nodes, not just relating them to the main city. In this sense, the regional train network (the branch of the Ferrovie Nord under consideration) has become a metropolitan train system serving urbanized areas and no longer - as it originally was - a collector of labour from the periphery towards Milan.

In this context, let us examine Dorothy Lee's definition of culture quoted above. In the city as we usually think of it, identity formation is based on the loci of history, birth, the family and traditional social groupings. The Diffused City maintains these mechanisms and adds more features on the one hand, new forms of voluntary association - based on neighbourhood, needs, interests - emerge, on the other, the places of involuntary association take on a new and greater importance in daily life.

As a function of pure frequency, one ends up knowing those who use the same transportation, shops and daily services; as a result the spaces in which these activities occur take on a special significance. The places characterized by history or family tradition, in the meantime, lose their importance in daily life as they assume a celebratory role, reserved for festive events.

In this context (further developed by sociologists of the contemporary city) the role of transportation nodes - train stations, metro entrances, highway exists - is of the greatest importance for the culture of the Diffused City.

Objectives for the Workshop

The fifth Culture Seminar offers the occasion to confront these findings and insights of a case-study nature with the other regional and cultural contexts which are represented, in order to understand the potential broader validity of the method adopted to understand and analyse the Diffused City as the basis for plans and actions. With this in mind, I would like to focus the discussion of the workshop on three objectives:

To reach a shared understanding of the Diffused City as a phenomenon which, though common to many cultures, is completely different from the traditional city as "big city", "urban sprawl", or "conurbation". The Diffused City, with its own logics, values and problems, is neither a positively or negatively loaded concept, but simply a different and completely new evolution.
To understand how the role of transportation systems changes in this reality, for which we cannot apply the well-tried methods adapted to traditional cities which are instead compact and distinct from their surrounding territory. Thinking in terms of "origin-destination flows", "quantitative influence basins", etc. means not having understood the evolution towards situations which are of a chaotic nature, not easily quantifiable and probably not fully describable, where minimum criteria of rationality are to be found in culture rather than quantities, form rather than function, usage rather than performance, and society rather than economy.
To understand the potential contribution of the town and regional planner, aware of the fragmentary nature of any attempt to control complex phenomena, and certain that the only way to approach this kind of issue is to observe how people communicate their needs through the construction and use of their territory.

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