EMA is dead. Long live the City of Science!

Milan. We’ve lost the EMA (European Medicines Agency), but we’ll still have the Science and Technology Park, born from the ashes of the pavilion of Expo 2015. Certainly, compared to the crowds that flocked to Expo 2015 during that crowded summer, the area now looks rather desolate. You enter a deserted landscape, as fascinating as Antonioni’s vision of a landscape in the Po Valley. Here the monument to life is represented by a solitary, perfectly preserved tigelleria (flat-bread booth). It's closed, of course. At the moment there’s not a scrap of green to be had for love or money – the greenery that in central Milan colours the pavements with leaves in autumn. But it’s coming. 

Vegetation is the starting point of the project: a linear park along the decumanus or main street. Andrea Ruckstuhl, Managing Director of Lend Lease, the Australian real-estate development multinational that won the tender assigned by Aerexpo, explains: “We see the park as the starting point for an urban regeneration project.” Lend Lease boasts a number of major success stories in its history, including locations such as Columbia University and the regeneration of London's post-Olympic village (at Stratford). The project, says Giuseppe Bonomi of Aerexpo, “has a long-term vision”. Land Lease has won a 99-year concession.  No wonder: this is the creation of a neighbourhood that will grow from scratch.  Making it feel alive and natural will take time. “It will definitely have a real-estate value, and there will be a building project to follow,” continues Giuseppe Bonomi. The project is divided into two parts: the park and the building development. The greenery will be designed by the Land firm. Andreas Kipar, the group’s founding architect, says: “Our design proposal involves the construction of a large 460,000 square-metre park with a theme, of which 130,000 square metres already exist. It will respect the original layout of the site, creating a balance between anthropic space and natural space.” The development is being designed by the architect Carlo Ratti, who explains, as the slides keep clicking past: “We started from the park because we wanted to begin with life, in what was a densely populated area during Expo.” The zone will have three characteristics. The linear park, following the decumanus. The Common Ground, the first two floors across the whole area, will be devoted to public life. Ratti calls them “serendipity spaces”. They will host shared, private or public functions, all intended as community spaces. The third point is innovative mobility: only small automatic electric cars will operate on the site. “People use their cars only 5% of the time,” explains Ratti, “but they take up a lot of space in our cities.” Driverless cars. This is the most futuristic feature, which will also strike the public as highly utopian. But it is also the one that the president of the Lombard Region, Roberto Maroni (Northern League), on the political side, wants to invest in. “As the Lombardy Region, we’ve contributed 50 million euros and the most convincing part is the electric mobility, which Volkswagen is investing in.” It’s fair to say that if Italy is seen abroad as the place where political bickering leads to futility and immobility, then this project, at least for the time being, proves it isn’t always so. The area’s future development sees bodies with different political colours pulling together harmoniously. The City of Milan (the centre-left Pisapia and Sala administration), the Lombardy Region's leadership represented by Maroni (Northern League) and the government (Renzi, contentious centre-left), are all working together on a project that, at least on paper, is for the public good and the community.