INFRASQUAT
One of the biggest issue of our time is the poor housing conditions of about the 50% of the urban population, forced to live in conditions of informality.
This condition is often considered as situation of poverty, poor sanitation, auto construction and auto exclusion by all the services that a city should provide.
This people are intellectually and socially excluded from the population and the city itself.
On the global scale this issue is caused by the continuous growth of the population since the 1970s.
Leading to a greater demand for services, to which, the now endless city world- wide, fails to respond, creating new mechanisms, antagonists for the society, for the appropriation of the urbanity.
The informal urbanism that now represents half of the world’s urban fabric has become the most spontaneous and ordinary way of doing architecture, mixing with the formalized existing urban fabric.
This creates an amorphous growing of the city and a new policy in contrast with those already present.
In most of the world cities the spaces informal architecture takes place are blank spaces that are often on the edge of towns and even not represented on maps, creating more exclusion and separation from what is the urban life of the city.
In an Italian reality as Milan many don’t know that this problem is present and that it is growing.
In Milan are present, according to a census of 2012, 22 sites of foreign populations and not living for the 63.6% in informality.
Now in Milan with Expo 2015 it also seems clear who is constructing but not for who, loosing the perspective of which are the problems of the city.
In Milan there are more than 270 brownfield sites. Some of them are going to be new gentrification spaces that are going to host housing speculation projects.
My project aims to give new life to those areas left abandoned or in this transformation phase. They may contain both disposal buildings or can be totally free, but the features I need is the presence within an existing urban reality already consolidated These areas are located inside
the perimeter of the city of Milan and settled in different areas within the urban fabric and not on the edge of the city. The project will be on one of these areas, that have been mapped, and which falls within the system of spaces that I found problematic through an analysis of the municipal area of Milan.
Starting from an empirical analysis of Milan that crosses different types of problems as the brownfield, services placement, the number of foreign residents and the areas with higher crime rates, to name a few.
Once I had the empirical analysis on the area of the municipality of Milan under the categories of analysis, I found an area that includes several spaces of Milan.
Applying the analysis already carried out only to this portion I managed to locate seven possible areas of intervention. All seven areas had the same problems and in all of these areas were abandoned spaces that give a chance to my project to fit within an existing urban context. I went to pick the most interesting area and the one that contains the largest number of different situations. This area is located near the former railway station of Porta Romana and placed behind the new Fondazione Prada.
The choice to work on an area and going to invade a new attraction in the city of Milan is tied to demonstrate how my urban architectural device can make different realities coexist within the same area. Going also to block the gentrification of the area and preventing speculative industrial building, instead privileging a type of housing linked to a situation of informality. Informality, which is organized and designed accord- ing to strict construction rules that create the possibility to make self-build constructions Going to encourage family-friendly settlement partitioned in to an area,
avoiding the type of informal architecture that generate the creation of slums and processes of overcrowd- ing and forced cohabitation.
In this way it will be possible for users to manage independently their own environment and enjoy and create new services in the same area so that they can integrate in the best way with the formalized existing urban context.
The project will take shape through the compositional principles of the Mat build- ing, to build a specific relationship between open spaces and urban existing fabric. Not only creating interconnections with the environment but also connections within the building itself. Eliminating the possibility of self-exclusion of the informal settlements and the resulting transformation into a ghetto. In this way there will be a consolidation of real pieces of cities, and it will make existing buildings used again without having to demolish them.
