Comune di Sesto San Giovanni

Sesto San Giovanni
Luciano CRESPI
Dans bien des cas le patrimoine des friches industrielles urbaines sert de prétexte à des spéculations immobilières, tandis que la manière d’habiter les villes et de consommer les espaces
urbains s’est dramatiquement transformée avec la substitution d’une nouvelle économie sociale
à l’ancienne économie du capitalisme industriel des XIXe-XXe siècles, bien encadrée et réglementée du point de vue des rapports sociaux. La nouvelle économie détruit le lien de l’homme
à un territoire et développe de nouveaux centres d’activité péri-urbains, incapables de générer
une nnouvelle identité. L’auteur en appelle à la définition d’une autre économie et d’un autre
usage du territoire, dans lequel les friches industrielles serviront de support à des activités, tant
culturelles qu’économiques, à la fois innovantes et flexibles, jetant ainsi un pont entre passé
et avenir. Sesto San Giovanni peut constituer de cette façon le laboratoire idéal d’une nouvelle
réalité urbaine tirant le meilleur parti d’un patrimoine industriel et d’une culture ouvrière d’une
exceptionnelle richesse.
In the panorama of those cities which
are engaged in processes of transformation of their territory and of change of their nature, the case of Sesto
San Giovanni appears to be a special
one. The most extensive built heritage which has been accumulated during
the period of industrial growth of the
city and of which today the major part
is hit by an irreversible process of dismissing, constitutes a tremendous
strategic resource allowing to design a
new project for the identity of Sesto
San Giovanni. What in other urban
contexts has often represented above
all an opportunity for real estate business, that is: the availabilty of a vast
heritage of spaces no longer in use
and to be immediately marketed again,
constitutes there the possible ground
for re-founding the idea of the contemporary city, able to meet the requirement for a deeply altered way of
life compared with that of the modern
city. This is why the application of Sesto San Giovanni for its recognition as
a city being part of the world heritage of the humanity, in the category of
evolving industrial landscapes, appears
to be definitely convincing.
As Jean-Luc Nancy wrote it, indeed,
today one lives anywhere but one lives
en passant, which means like passers-by
in a hurry, in a world equally destined
to pass rapidly. At this point, consequently, Umberto Galimbieri argues,
« to man nothing does remain except
for the destiny of the ‘passer-by’ who,
opposite to the ‘traveller’ who is making his way to a point of arrival for
reaching a final aim is adhering from
time to time to the landscapes he meets along his way, and which in his
eyes are not places of transit waiting
for that “Ithaca” which makes any
land a mere stop on the return way
(…) Without an aim and without start
and arrival places which would not be
casual points, the ethics of the passerby, who does not know his future, may
become the reference point of a human society to which technology has
delivered an unpredictable future.”
The result is a speeding-up of the processes of “de-territorialization” and,
as a consequence, the spreading of
behaviours intended to consuming the
places, mainly public ones, according
to modes which in fact differ from
those of past times, and characterised by the prevalence of a search not
so much for forms of identity as for
opportunities of well-being, of individual pleasure, temporary ones, and
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Sesto San Giovanni
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to which one should not get attached.
What does make close to each other
these two phenomenological data of
the contemporary way of life: the search for living anywhere and the affirmation of the ethics of the passer-by,
.is the predominance of the form of
mobility over whichever other form
of behaviour linked to the use of the
urban places. This is what imposes to
look at the transformations which are
happening in the territory with different eyes in comparison with the past,
even with the most recent one.
Such transformations have happened inside an economic pattern, a
characteristic of the XXth century,
which was made possible in particular
through the development of telecommunications and of the computers
industry, which has laid the basis for
an immaterial configuration of economy. One of its consequences has
been the decentralization of some activities outside of urban centres and
the creation of “areas of manufacturing for export”, wherein the low cost
of work allows businesses to enjoy
substantial savings. The same decentralization process can be observed
concerning computerized labour, a
typical feature of the tertiary sector,
which consists in an immaterial activity performed at a most high speed,
and which is not concerned at any rate
by its geographical location. Therefore, one could say that the new economic era has favoured the definition
of global cities, of international axes
by which means financial actions, material concrete processes linked to the
activities, and the infrastructures needed for globalization are implemented. The spreading of spaces devoted
to commercial and office use leads
to a precise form of de-centralized
re-concentration in the urban periphery. With the reduced number of
salaried people in the big plants and
management centres, an economy has
been created in parallel with the classical industrial one, which was based
on contractual relationships and on
wage earners’ contacts through trade
unions. It is a matter of a new social
economy produced by a constantly increasing number of subjects who are
no longer framed within the ancient
and regulated industrial relationships,
who don’t operate in industrial areas,
but are freely active on the market of
a weak and diffused entrepreneurship
on the territory. That mass, as argues
Andrea Branzi, invents new types of
work, new businesses, new services
and new forms of relational economy.
It is often turbulent and discontinuous, and has activated a new and
inadequate way of using the city. That
type of mass entrepreneurship and of
diffused work, creative and dust-like,
which Jeremy Rifkin is telling about,
is operating by means of the multiplication of electronic instruments, and
is no longer to be framed within the
old zoning , such as those which had
been foreseen in the 1942 Charter of
Athens. It is not only invading that
most vast abandoned real estate heritage made of factories, offices, laboratories, but also develops an inadequate and transversal use of the
new architectures, according to often
elusive using criteria which induce
places (internal as well as internal) of
a low functional identity level, however,
just for that reason, adequate places
for being interpreted as open opportunities.
That new social economy, both a destructured and dynamic one, gets to
be framed within those phenomena,
typical of a society like ours, which
must daily operate fo the purpose
of reforming itself, by elaborating in a
positive mode its own condition of
permanent crisis, which Kevin Kelly has
defined as a condition indispensable
to its own survival and to develop-
Luciano CRESPI
ment. Consequently, it is a matter of
dynamic process, unlikely to be governed by the dispositions elaborated by the XXth century policy, nor
by the classical modernity, which was
busy with the search for definitive
and permanent solutions to perfectly
defined problems and functions. In
the current society, characterized by
continuous innovation, one should rather
aspire, as further states Andrea Branzi, to a type of project making interested in the search for reversible solutions, uncompleted, provisional ones,
capable to guarantee the possibility
of escaping rigid decisions unable to
react in front of frequent changes of
meaning and function.
Then can spring up new species of
spaces, new functions, with a predominance of the residential, cultural
(universities, museums, mediatheques, thematic parks), commercial
ones and above all of new professions and new consumptions. Many
of them being obtained from the very
inside of the urban sectors of abandoned factories and management offices.
Data and authors are agreeing on the
description of the emerging Restora-
tive Development as a new phase of
growth of the world economy, on the
re-functionalization and the change
for re-use of a large part of the best
consolidated architectural typologies.
According to the American economist Storm Cunningham, the market of
internal and external transformations
of our cities will be one of the most
important businesses of the XXIst
century. Besides, it is closely linked
to the contemporary culture of urban
sustainable development, which generates the need, as a consequence, for
responsible choices, projected into
the future, accompanied with a prevision of the consequences and with
the formulation of criteria of evaluation able to be renovated at any moment. Flexibility and adaptation are
constituting the articulations of the
sustainable living systems which permit the management of a continuous
change of the user or of his needs.
Within that complex pattern, the
“case” of Sesto San Giovanni acquires a paradigmatic value, in its quality
of a possible experimental laboratory
of new practices of re-functionalizing the city, by means of an itinerary
Fig.1
Travelling crane,
close to the Museum
of Industry and
Labour.
Le pont roulant,
jouxtant le Musée
de l’Industrie et du
Travail
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Sesto San Giovanni
Fig.2
Interior of a hall in
the ex-Breda area 1.
Intérieur d’une halle
de la zone de l’ exBreda 1.
along which there lies a possible coexistence between requirements of social cohesion and innovative actions
in the management of the territorial
resources. When in 1996, due to an
initiative from the Municipality of Sesto San Giovanni, the Development
Agency North Milan was created, in
collaboration with the neighbouring
Municipalities of Cisinello, Bresso
and Cologno Monzese, the intention
was that of recuperating the disimissed areas in an urbanistic and also environmental perspective, pointing to
Fig.3
Interior of a hall in
the ex-Breda area 2.
Intérieur d’une halle
de la zone de l’ exBreda 2.
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“innovation and new technologies as
strategic elements for promoting a sustainable development of the territory” and providing a series of “services
supporting entrepreneurship in innovative and high technological content
sectors”. This has lead, in 1999, to the
elaboration of the “Strategic Plan for
North Milan”, based on the existence of seven strategic lines. In other
words, the definition of a “new identity of the area” and of a niw image
for North Milan; the construction of
a “new economic and productive mis-
Luciano CRESPI
sion” based on technological innovation, on the “strengthening and the
qualification of human resources” in
the perspective of encouraging social
inclusion and cohesion; the “development of an integrated system of infrastructures” serving the sustainable
mobility; the “governing of great and
small transformations” in the cities
by means of a project of new centralities; the start of actions of environmental rehabilitation connected
with the introduction of new urban
qualities; the promotion of an “institutional cooperation”for the purpose
of rendering more efficient the planned interventions.
In coherence with those orientations, the Municipality has engaged
the construction of the Museum of
Industry and Labour, an instrument
intended to “meet the challenge of
the relationship between modernity and historical memory, in view of
connecting the economic developmentwith the quality of urban life”.
A Museum which is planning the presence of five gates, to be understood
as symbolic points of access to the
city, of a series of places containing
museums and exhibitions activities,
of fifty-two antennas of which role
will be to testify, by making it visible,
the presence of sites dispersed throughout the territory which belong to
the industrial history of the city: from
the old heroic production complexes
to workers’ houses, to other structures destined to work activity such as
furnaces, to infrastructures endowed
with a strong symbolic and communicative meaning, such as water towers,
the tower of the models, and so on.
A diffuse museum, therefore, not at
all conceived as just a nostalgic and
melancholic testimony of the story
of past times, instead being planned,
through the multiple achievements capable to foster new activities, for the
construction of a different identity
of the city. Truly said, in the perspective, as above mentioned, of thinking
the city as a container adaptable to a
multiplicity of activities, continuously renewable and riversible, destined
to often unpredictable uses insofar
as they are permanently called by the
turn-up of new forms of diffuse creativity.
In that sense the question of the safeguard of the built industrial heritage
takes on a more complex signification. The point, indeed, is not only
to adopt efficient dispositions able to
“conserve” the architectures which
are representing the memory of a
phase in the development of the city.
But rather to bring them back to the
disposal of the community, to make
them alive, by returning to them a
function which cannot be exclusively
that of becoming “museums of themselves”. Notwithstanding, one should
be careful to preserve their symbolic
value for the community which they
are part of, and, first and foremost,
their undisputable intrinsic value as
containers of spaces of an outstanding quality.
That is what I have attempted to do
with groups from my students in the
Fig.4
Alena Fara, Claudia
Ghirardelli, A Project
for music workshops
in the ex-Breda
area, academic year
2006-2007.
Alena Fara, Claudia
Ghirardelli, Projet
d’ateliers musicaux
dans la zone de
l’ex-Breda, année
académique 20062007
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Sesto San Giovanni
Fig.5
Gabriele Lombardi,
Tania Garduno, A
Project for tv
laboratories in the
ex-Breda area,
academic year
2006 07.
Gabriele Lombardi, Tania Garduno,
Projet de
laboratoires de
télévision dans la
zone de l’ex-Breda,
année académique
2006-2007
Fig.6
Federica Freschet,
Marina La Pira, A
Project for
laboratories of design in the ex-Breda
area, academic year
2006 07.
Federica Freschet,
Marina La Pira,
Projet de
laboratoires de
dessin dans la
zone de l’ex-Breda,
année académique
2006-2007
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course for the Laurea of Design for
interior decoration, in the course of a
three years collaboration between the
Faculty of Design at the Politecnico di
Milano and the Municipality of Sesto
San Giovanni. Starting from a work of
recognition of the specific features and
of the quality of those places, these
students have tried to imagine various
possibilities of re-use, in coherence
with their nature and their history. A
hard work, which often they have had
to compare with the temptation of
facing them in the same way as Gille
Clément deems the “gardener” has to
take care of gardens “in the move”,
that is to say by observing, studying,
however finally confining themselves
to assist the natural flux of the plants,
in such a manner as to let them free
not to accept a shape defined a priori.
But a work which later has been directed, in a more courageous way, towards an attempt to determine various
modes of use, always, nonetheless, in
the perspective of interventions of a
rather fitting-up, temporary and reversible nature, even if being able at the
same time to make sense, to encourage
itineraries of research towards possible forms of identity of the premises.
That happened in a particular manner
in the course of the last year, during
which people worked with the thought of destining part of the former
Breda area to functions analogous to
those which, in other contexts, have
been defined as “City of the youth”.
As if they were dealing with an ideal
and symbolic transmission of orders,
from spaces born for the production
of goods to laboratories for the production of ideas, of knowledge and
of creativity, the projects have assigned to the extant architectures functions able to give them back a strategic role in the transformation of the
city of Sesto from “city of factories”
into a new pole of innovative and
high technology activities: from the
production of music to that of design and new shapes in crafts, of new
artistic languages and of new media,
to theatrical production and to higher
training in the field of communication and of writing. An articulated
system of places, indeed, not addressing consumption as much as the production of new kinds of knowledge
and cultural activities. Which goes
towards the collection, under forms
fitting to our contemporary epoch,
of the inheritance of that particular,
strongly cohesive social fabric which
has always characterized Sesto San
Giovanni. As Giandomenico Piluso
wrote it: “Industry in Sesto has not
be limited to heavy industry and big
installations in the vicinity of the four
major businesses – la Breda, la Falck,
la Ercole e la Magneti Marelli – medium and small size businesses have
been developing in the light industries (from publishing to food processing, to light engineering). Thus can
be explained the vitality of a productive framework which has not got to
extinction with the progressive closing down of the big mechanical and
Luciano CRESPI
Fig.7
Federica Freschet,
Marina La Pira, A
Project for a reading
room in the ex-Breda area, academic
year 2006 07.
Federica Freschet,
Marina La Pira,
Projet de salle de
lecture dans la
zone de l’ex-Breda,
année académique
2006-2007
steel plants in the course of the ‘80s
and of the ‘90s. There can be identified the strong sign of an immaterial
inheritance which has gone through a
long period of sedimentation in the
associative and professional cultures,
in the workers’ know how and in the
practices of socialisation of an area
which has stratified its proper history by degrees, successfully mixing the
pre-industrial world of the XIXth
century and the XXth century industrialism, big and small size production, social cooperation and conflicts,
catholic cultures and social-communist ones..
It is precisely that particularity which
allows us today to attribute to the
episode of the ultimate casting which
took place in 1996 at the Falck Unione the meaning, not of an inexorable
decline, but, on the contrary, of the
beginning of a phase of re-foundation, able to assign to Sesto the role
of “city-laboratory”, in equality with
some big European metropolis. From
that point of view, the travelling crane, that extraordinary “marine creature” washed up – in which times,
who knows ? – on the soil of Sesto,
and reduced, today, to the condition
of a seducing, however disquieting
carcass, behind which the sun seems
to go down with some modesty, like
someone who does not know how to
recognize the value of testimony of
wonderful never told stories of persons who have lived for a long time
in its belly, represents a powerful, tremendous metaphor of that potential
new life of the city.
Luciano CRESPI is professor at the Politecnico
di Milano.
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