Citizens initiatives in the face of power: the reuse of two derelict areas in Milan

Carolina Pacchi DAStU, Politecnico di Milano carolina.pacchi@polimi.it

Abstract Citizens initiatives are increasingly gaining ground in contemporary cities, due to both a shift in governance modes towards more horizontal and inclusive forms, and to the shrinking role of Local Authorities in many fields. The cases discussed in the paper concern two grassroots initiatives in the city of Milan (Italy), both animated by citizens groups: in the first one, citizens mobilised for the restoration and renewal of a complex of former railway warehouses near the Central Station, pushing the Municipality and the owner to intervene; in the second one, the object of the mobilisation are the different proposals for the rehabilitation of a very central former harbour area on the Navigli canals, abandoned and in state of decay. The paper, after shortly describing the two architectural and urban contexts, will critically discuss the achievements and the open problems linked to the two initiatives, paying particular attention to the governance dimension, and looking at how these citizens initiatives changed the relationship between Local Government (both at municipal and at district level), citizens, community organisations and the owners, and how they contributed to open up a new space of possibilities for experimenting urban innovation. Finally, the paper will focus on the impact these kind of mobilisation processes can have at a more general urban governance level, trying to identify the underlying risks that decision making remains just incremental, in the absence of a strategic vision able to tackle relevant urban questions, and the connected risk of capture of the public agenda.

1.The role of grassroots initiatives: a challenge for Italian cities and the case of Milan Grassroots initiatives, in a number of different fields, animated by neighbourhood or citizens groups, are increasingly diffused in contemporary cities (della Porta e Andretta, 2001; della Porta, 2004); many observers link this phenomenon to a shift in governance modes at local level (Le Gals, 2002; Denters, Rose, 2005), to expectations about the enhancement of local democracy and to processes of redefinition of collective identities (as defined for instance by Melucci, 1996); others underline the link with the shrinkage of traditional forms of welfare state in European cities, connected in turn with the drastic reduction of local government resources, which leads citizens to mobilise in order to directly supply and share local services not available anymore (Moulaert et al., 2007; Vicari Haddock, Moulaert, 2009). At the same time, in European cities there are significant underused public and private assets: buildings and open spaces, currently derelict or partially abandoned, which are the legacy of the relevant urban infrastructural and welfare policies of the past century. In many urban contexts, initiatives for the reuse of such abandoned or underused resources have been attracting the attention of citizens in recent years. The urban nature of such collective goods is a relevant analytical dimension: in fact, it is possible to relate the urban as material culture to the right to inhabit, on the one hand, and the right to occupy and use public spaces, to gather and to protest, on the other(Leontidou, 2010, p. 1181). In this perspective, they become an occasion for various initiatives of re-appropriation of liveable spaces and the object of forms local mobilisation. As in many European cities, in Milan the societal and decision making systems have become increasingly complex and fragmented over the last twenty years. In Italy in in particular, the traditional mass party system, organised and rooted in local contexts has been disappearing since the mid-1990s, and this has led in turn to the emergence of new type of political actors both on the local and on the national scene. In general, Milan has always been regarded as a self-governing city, a context in which the role of private actors, both profit and non-profit, of higher education institutions and of various and diverse other stakeholders has always been as important as that of Local Authorities in setting the agenda and in proposing programmes and projects (Balducci, Fedeli, Pasqui, 2011; Galimberti 2013). Moreover, the city has a long-standing tradition of civil society organisations, which have been leading actors in different policy fields (Ranci, 2009; Bobbio, Dente, Spada, 2005).

From traditional charities and volunteering organizations, to foundations and non-profit agencies, to neighbourhood and community groups, over the last decades the city of Milan has consolidated a tradition of what can be defined as private production of public goods. As an answer to neo-liberal urban policies (Moulaert, 2007), the intervention of such locally active groups has been particularly visible in the last years. They proved to be not only service providers (healthcare, elderly care, immigration, environmental issues, culture, heritage protection), but also active at shaping the public debate and raising awareness on the possibility of alternative urban agendas. 2.The two cases: Milan and its urban transformations It comes as no surprise that in such a governance context, in the last ten years a number of grassroots initiatives has been gaining importance and visibility in pushing issues on the urban agenda on the one hand and in directly mobilising resources from local communities to try and resolve local questions on the other. The two cases which will be discussed in this paper are quite recent, and they are therefore strictly connected to the political climate of the centre-left local government which entered into power in 2011 with the election of Mayor Giuliano Pisapia; there are nevertheless a number of other cases which lasted much longer, significantly re-shaping from below the debate on local sustainability, social cohesion and re-appropriation of abandoned public spaces. In this paragraph we will briefly describe the emerging characters of the two urban contexts and of the objects of local mobilisations, and we will critically discuss the main elements of the mobilisations themselves. As we will see, the spatial and social features of the two neighbourhoods and of the buildings or infrastructures which are the object of the local mobilisations impact very significantly on the development of the two cases. In the first case, a group of citizens launched a mobilisation for the restoration and reuse of a large complex of abandoned railway warehouses (Magazzini Raccordati), under the railway embankment, pushing the Municipal Government and the owner (Grandi Stazioni, a company controlled by Ferrovie dello Stato, the national rail operator, and aimed at valorising the main Italian stations) to intervene and to open up a dialogue process. This case shows some peculiar and interesting features: firstly, Magazzini Raccordati are a private property, but at the same time they play an urban role of public relevance, since they are located just under the railway tracks of Milan Central Station, stretching one kilometre North East. They are a long sequence of abandoned warehouses, bordering two streets (total

surface 40.000 sq.m.), originally occupied by railway services and subsequently rented to logistics and wholesale activities, up to when the contracts have expired and have not been renewed by the current management. Since a number of years the more than hundred spaces are therefore empty and in decay, negatively affecting the urban quality of the surrounding streets and of the whole neighbourhood, which is perceived as neglected and unsafe by its inhabitants.

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Fig. 1 Magazzini Raccordati, seen from via F. Aporti

Due to this perception, a citizens group, called FAS Ferrante Aporti Sammartini, started to get mobilized towards the end of 2011, in order to attract the attention of the Municipal Government on the area and to promote public participation and debate on the possible strategies for the rehabilitation of the warehouses complex and of the surrounding neighbourhood. Initially the expression of an already existing group aimed at supporting the candidate Giuliano Pisapia in the 2011 local elections, it has been growing, involving people and organisations with different backgrounds (individual citizens and shop owners never involved in politics, existing cultural associations, ). The mobilisation started with a public assembly, a quite traditional means, but it subsequently developed and tested various tools, aimed at attracting the attention and at establishing an effective relationship with the Municipal Government and the district council, so that they could become a go-between with the owner. To this end, citizens have been able to design and implement an articulated bottom up participatory process, organised in public hearings, urban trekking in the neighbourhood, workshops on future strategies, organisation of cultural events and local festivals, etc. This process, despite the difficulties of establishing an effective dialogue with the Municipal Government and the owner, and of a

tangible power unbalance, has been able to put back the Magazzini Raccordati and the neighbouring area on the public agenda and in the urban debate.

Fig. 2. A local workshop, organised by citizens to discuss about future urban renewal strategies for the area

In the second case the object of local mobilisation are the different rehabilitation projects for the Darsena area, an old harbour terminal of the Navigli urban canal system, now abandoned and for many years in a state of decay. In the years of neglect, since the area was not in use and the Darsena had been almost completely drained, a valuable natural ecosystem developed, a wilderness zone, with the traditional characters of woods growing near the water systems in the wider region, with which it shares the same type of flora and fauna.

Fig. 3. The Darsena area during the years of neglect and a rendering of the second version of the project proposed by DarsenaPioniera

The Darsena area is located in a very central position, bordering the historical centre of Milan and the Navigli area, known for nightlife; it is characterized by a very active local civil society, and has therefore been the object of a number of mobilisations for urban rehabilitation. The group we propose to analyse here appears on the local scene after many experiences of local activism, but is seems particularly interesting because it has been

working on a project aimed at bringing wilderness back into the heart of the city, following a model of urban oasis which is diffused for instance in Britain, but quite new to Italian cities. Formed by a group of designers, landscape architects and journalist, DarsenaPioniera gets mobilised in 2009 when the area was temporarily abandoned and neglected, while the Municipality was concluding a decision making process for an underground parking, a project which is the end has been cancelled. The aim of DarsenaPioniera is to propose and find support for a rehabilitation project for the empty space, which in the meantime had become a spontaneous green area. The project, unlike all the other ones which have been proposed by the City Council and other actors, recognizes the intrinsic value of wild flora, and thus proposes very light forms of intervention, aimed at leaving the new ecosystem untouched, and at identifying spaces for small local gardens, in order to enhance participation on the part of citizens and neighbourhood groups. This proposal has been technically defined and proposed to the Administration, and it has gained some local support through diverse and creative forms of involvement, aimed at citizens, neighbourhood groups and children from local schools. Despite a technically sound project and a thorough mobilisation process, the project has been implemented on a temporary basis by the previous Municipal Government, but is has been dropped in the end by the current government because it does not fit into the overall redesign of the Milan water system for Expo 2015. In the face of the need, expressed by the Municipality, to bring water back into the basin, DarsenaPioniera proposed to modify their original project, in order to allow the presence of a wetland preserving at least part of the wilderness, but this proposal has been met with skepticism and ultimately dropped by the Deputy Mayor in charge.

Fig. 4. The Darsena project proposed by the Municipality in the framework of EXPO 2015

3.Innovations in governance and open questions After the short description of the two cases, we will propose some reflections, still quite open, on the central question of the relationship between grassroots initiatives and Local Government action from two perspectives: the first perspective is quite internal to the mobilisations themselves, and following Tarrow (Tarrow, 2011, p. 120-122), it explores how these mobilisations have been able to use existing networks and organisations, how they have been able to build new shared identities and to give a new meaning to their action, and how much they have been able to use and transform the system of political opportunities; the second one looks at the changes in governance modes or governance styles implied by grassroots action at local level, and to the changing relationships with more institutionalised actors, the Municipal Government in primis, trying to understand how a shift from hierarchy to networks can contribute to bring about innovation in coping with complex urban problems. For the first aspect, .i.e. the internal characters of the groups, in both cases the ability to activate and use existing networks and organisations has been crucial in order to gather the resources needed for local action. The different contexts and the different nature of the object can explain the difference in such networks: while in the case of FAS they were rooted in local political activism (especially in the first phases), in the Darsena case the group was based on professional networks and personal acquaintances. In both cases networking has proven to be crucial not only to gain support and enlarge the coalition, but especially to mobilise experts and technical knowledge which, in the end, seems to be the crucial resource to innovatively respond to complex urban problems. As far as the build-up of a shared local identity is concerned, both groups strongly identify themselves with the object of their mobilisation (the rehabilitation of the railway warehouses in one case and of the harbour area in the other ), thus overlooking broader urban questions: this can be seen at the same time as a strength and as a weakness. It is a strength because it helps to selectively concentrate the attention and the various types of resources towards a clear end and to create a meaning, to help people make sense of what they are doing for their neighbourhood; but at the same time it is a weakness, because it triggers forms of appropriation, which in turn can cause conflict and disputes with citizens or other neighbourhood groups, thus weakening local voice in the face of the Local Authority, and because it may cause a myopic attitude towards broader urban questions.

As far as the last point is concerned, it is necessary to better investigate the real ability of these and of many other local mobilisations in Milan of opening up new spaces of possibility, looking at the way they have built up (or modified) forms of relationship with the Municipal Government and with the owners or the developers. The two cases offer quite different answers: DarsenaPioniera in the end has not been able to interact with the rehabilitation process promoted by the Municipality, also because from a certain moment in time the process has been linked up with EXPO 2015, therefore entering into a typical state of exception which characterises the management of big events at the urban level. It seems that this state of exception, together with the difficulties in gaining support for the project at local level, contributed to limit the political opportunities, thus leading to a final failure of the project proposal. The railway warehouses case is partially different, even though it is still in a different phase of the decision making process: here political opportunities have been seized though a patient activity of relationship building with the Municipal Government, both at central and at district level; the Deputy Mayor in charge of Urban Planning accepted to play a mediation role with the private owner, because of the relevance of the area, and also because the FAS group has gained both visibility and trustworthiness; at the same time, financial difficulties in a period of crisis make the future redevelopment process of such a large estate quite uncertain at the moment. Finally, it is possible to make some remarks about the impact that such mobilisations had on the citizens groups themselves, which are quite different: they are at the same time constrained to promote the projects at the centre of their shared identity, and divided between the need to cooperate with the Local Government and to preserve a political distance and autonomy. As we have seen, both groups we analysed have chosen a cooperative, rather than an oppositional strategy towards the Municipal Government, and the fact that their requests have been met very differently is not linked with their attitude, which at the beginning has been quite similar.

For the second perspective, as we have seen, Milan is characterised by diverse forms of informal social action aimed at resolving public problems, and in the last few years the possible synergies between these initiatives and Local Government action has been at the centre of local debate. Public intervention on informal social networks can be quite

problematic (Schn, 1985): if networks themselves risk to become ineffective and inappropriate exactly when they are successful, at the same time the combination of a hierarchical principle with informal network action risks to cancel the positive effects of informality, adding unnecessary burdens to the initiatives, especially when they interfere with political directions. A second aspect is specifically linked with the Milan political context: the election of Mayor Pisapia in 2011 (after twenty years of centre-right local governing coalitions) on an electoral platform significantly based on public participation, triggered expectations for more open, transparent and inclusive decision making processes. In particular, the former electoral supporters, organised into neighbourhood groups, decided not to disperse after the elections, but on the contrary to remain in place, in order to help the Municipality to communicate with citizens and to strengthen public participation. These expectations, approaching mid-term, have not been completely met, due to a number of reasons, and this causes disappointment and dissatisfaction, especially among the most engaged and proactive citizens groups. One final remark, which in turn opens up new research paths, is about the overall effectiveness of such fragmented and molecular urban action. In a self-governing city like Milan, decision making runs the risk to be incremental and conservative, as it may become difficult to put forward new strategic visions, if Local Government is not able to reframe and tackle broader urban questions. Finally, there is a risk of capture of the public agenda by individual and localised interests, which can in turn negatively affect the public or collective nature of the objects of local mobilisations.

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