The Central Park in between Torino and Milano

This paper aims at discussing a possible legacy of Expo Milano 2015 by proposing a new idea of park based on different layered landscapes in the Region between Torino and Milano. This works is part of a wider research program developed at the Department of Architecture and Urban Studies of the Politecnico di Milano. The first research phase is focused on the analysis of the Region – moreover similar to most italian human landscapes - where: the cities and the villages (especially in their historical centers) are characterized by an outstanding spatial quality; vast portions of the open spaces, both natural or exploited for agricultural uses, are well set, maintained and already considered as parks, either by being formally protected or by being in fact used as leisure areas and therefore included within public and private actions of informal attention and care, responding to a more and more pressing demand from inhabitants (insiders) and “users” like the tourists (ousiders); several fringe areas like those between the built centers, their peripheries and the countryside, the borders of the infrastructures, the industrial settlements, the areas surrounding shopping centers are dramatically lacking in terms of spatial design. The case study is of particular interest, for the presence of two of the major cities of the Po valley, emerging from a system of medium sized and small cities, and where different entities are overlapping to create a complex layered landscape: • a bundle of infrastructure belonging to the “long and fast” network of European corridors, intersecting just in the middle of the area; • a thick network of “short and slow” regional railways conceived and built in the years 1850-1930s; • historical paths across the Alps (via Francigena); • a system of parks along the rivers and other unique protected areas like those of the morainic landscape around Ivrea, the Baragge, the remains of the planitial forest emerging from the rice fields nearby Trino, Ticino river, Groane Park, the agricultural park around south Milano and others; • close connections with Unesco sites (vineyard landscapes, Sacri Monti, the candidate site of Ivrea and Olivetti); • canals for irrigation and energy production (with the monumental Canale Cavour among all); • strongly structured agricultural landscapes (rice fields, orchards, vineyards); • important super-places like factories (Pirelli in Settimo Torinese), shopping malls (Settimo Cielo, Vicolungo Outlet), logistic poles, Malpensa airport, Fiera Milano and the Expo 2015 site. Considering the fact that the whole system, including the infrastructural network is today mature and complete in terms of infrastructure and settlement, the whole Region can be considered as an ideal ground of action, to improve its spatial quality by enhancing a system of inter metropolitan parks, well innervated in terms of accessibility. There is a concrete opportunity to re-connect and rethink the whole landscape, by producing a new kind of public inter metropolitan “Central Park”, considering the infrastructures and the in between left-over spaces as the most meaningful places where to intervene, even with light projects based on the improvement of the existing physical asset. To achieve this goal, two main perceptive and design approaches are proposed, to re-think of the role of the infrastructural system as a positive element of a complex human landscape: • to consider the landscape of infrastructures as it is perceived by travelers moving along it and by the inhabitants of the crossed territories improving in both cases their experience; • to improve the spatial quality of the places of interface between infrastructure and its environment (natural, agricultural and built) like the “banks” of the highways and railways, the stations on the regional railways network and the service areas placed along the main road and highways and to be considered as gates to this system of parks. • To consider the Torino Milano Region as a place of experimentation of a new kind of inter metropolitan park is possible, also considering that the event of the Expo 2015 in Milano has produced, as a positive legacy, some landscape design approaches and solutions (waterway through the Groane Park, parks and other linear open spaces around the site) that could be applied to other, somehow similar, areas like the logistic poles of Novara, Biandrate or Abbadia di Stura, the Vicolungo and Settimo Cielo shopping malls and others. As a framework, to support this idea could also refer to recent developments of the idea of smartness, extending it from the urban scale to the regional one, by experimenting the use of the ICTs and of specific digital services in marginal places as a tool to integrate the traditional spatial design actions, so to create better living conditions and contribute to better relationships between people and places.