Launched in 1985 with the first stage of an international competition by invitation, the redevelopment of the Pirelli site in Milan's Bicocca district is one of the last major urban projects undertaken in the 20th century, together with the Vila Olímpica in Barcelona, for example, or Canary Wharf in the London Docklands.
A quarter of a century after work began in 1989, completion of the last voids and landscaping of the Collina dei Ciliegi, green areas have substantially ferried the redevelopment principles of its original programme into a new image of the city. This compares decisively with the explosion of new districts that – from the Bovisa to the former trade fair zone and the Garibaldi-Repubblica area – are rapidly transforming Milan's skyline and radiocentric structure.
Covering 700,000 square metres (comparable to the Défense in Paris and larger than the cases of London and Barcelona), the redevelopment of the ex-Pirelli tyre production plant is not only the most significant operation among the albeit numerous examples of converted disused industrial sites. It is also the one that has most forcefully identified the theme of urban projects with a strategic vision of the contemporary city and with the role which architecture is expected to perform in it.

Gregotti calls it a "slow", "long-lasting" project, by applying to architecture the well-known historical theories of Fernand Braudel. These provocatively go against the claims of instant architecture, which has established itself as a dominant practice in the logic of the master plan, where the notion of design as a "modification" rejects the expectations of definitive utopias as well as the devotion to liberating acts, which avoid belonging to any historical context. From this point of view, therefore, the whole Bicocca operation can be considered the most radical and coherent expression of a position which, compared to the dismal failure of the past decade's planning euphoria, claims its revenge both on the theory of "junk space" and on acceptance of "sprawl" as a model of "spontaneous" urban planning from the lowest level.
Although it has been the subject of discussion among urban planners, architects, artists, sociologists, artists, the theme of the contemporary city has not yet received convincing answers despite a plethora of proposals. These have mistaken the ecological perspective for a highly imaginative shortcut to a future with more fabulous than real prospects. Or they have adapted the metaphor of social fluidity to the laissez-faire of financial capitalism, by translating it into a gratuitous variety of patterns founded on iconic abuse and artistic invention. Thus, despite a substantial collection of future-oriented images, the issue of urban design has basically been eluded. Substituted by the case-bycase practice, it has thus let everybody in and reduced social responsibility to a choice of aesthetic options.
From the end of the 19th century, modern tradition grew out of a reflection on the new city, in the awareness that the advent of mechanisation called for radical approaches to the prefiguration of contemporary society. The passage from an industrial to a postindustrial and global society has by now made those patterns irremediably impracticable. It has not, however, erased the awareness (indeed it has made it more dramatically topical) of the need for a development principle that considers the "new" as a dialectic interrelation with context, and not a submission to gratuitous decorative morphologies.

This is the essence of Vittorio Gregotti's stance when he maintains that "the design of a new city requires a development principle together with its comparison to the empirical state of things, of necessities and of the site". It is not the invention of an abstract model to be applied to the land. Rather, it is a proposal to start development from the complexity of the existent, and from the attainment of an order which does not erase or simplify a place's existing tensions, but organises them so as to make them visible and comparable. In the case of the Bicocca quarter, this means relating to the site's industrial past (to the memory of the factory enclosure), as also to the historical interrelations between radiocentric Milan and its suburbs. But one must also consider the legacy of an intellectual tradition which, in terms of districts and of the city, produced its most convincing results: from the rationalist ensembles of Pagano and Albini to the "revisionist" ensembles of the INA-Casa public housing season created by Ponti, Gardella, Figini and Pollini. The search for new basic rules was, on the other hand, the trump card played by the best Italian architecture, to this day demonstrated by the exemplariness of many "new towns" built under the Fascist regime, and by Rome's EUR quarter, not by chance considered to be one of the contemporary capital's most liveable areas. This does not mean praise of the past, but its critical reconsideration beyond all ideological screens and all claims to innovation for its own sake.
With one or two isolated exceptions, compared to the many ideas of a city being realised in the urban voids of Milan – Porta Vittoria, Piazzale Maciacchini, ex-trade fair zone, Santa Giulia, Famagosta – the Bicocca quarter is the only one that has its own defined identity. With time, this has become steadily sharper in its relations to the city's edges. It also seems to be keeping its promise to become the historic centre of a new suburb.