Page 32 - Milano Periferia

THE ECOClDE

"Those" outskirts of yesterday have become town today and the outskirts
of today are the negation of those of yesterday. To express myself with the
pregnant slang of the new school of Francoforte, they do not possess any
more a "cultural identity", yet they have been dispossessed of any culture
whatever. They are inhabited by strangers, not that the people crowding
the rooms of the innumerable joint-ownership buildings, sprung up like
mushrooms after a rainy night around the water-edge of the last remaining
houses, come from outside, but because they have never been assimilated
to the town life: passive subjects therefore, an unripe and not plucked fruit
of the "middle class proletarization", tertiaries today rather than workers.

To the traveller, to the commuter coming in - or going out - the town
by now presents itself as something armour-plated or harshly anonymous
and spectral. And even the linearity has been broken by the zigzagging
of the dizzy heights, by the bursting pyramidal or Atzech forms. The huge
conurbations of the new quarters (Tessera, Quarto Oggiaro, Gallaratese,
Gratosoglio, etc.) group, press, each one throwing itself one on the other
seeking for space. They open widely rows of windows all rigorously alike
for a countless row of storeys looking like glass eyes, showing off sequen-
ces of tub-like balconies, from which springs up timidly a flower-pot. They
sometimes weigh upon lead-coloured half-dark arcades as on fossilized
legs of stegosaurs.

One never receives the impression of a unity which governs the whole of
these newly-born forms, which seem rather excreted by the chance,
sprung up from the primaeval chaos.

The eight London "new towns", which arose after a plan dating back to
1944, amid very large parentheses of verdure, each one with an autono-
mous centre, rational streets and well-planned and fixed recreative spaces,
may be opinable in a way, but are certainly a humiliating example for our
anarchical town-planning, which has always refused every model, every
plan designed beforehand. On the other hand, Milan is similar in this
aspect to other Italian towns, Naples, Palermo, Rome etc.

The urban transformation has changed into ecocide through criminal
actions. With the pretext of hygienic reasons and modern road planning,
here and elsewhere, were carried out massive destructions of real building
and historical patrimonies constituted by the popular quarters and was
legalized the forced exodus of their inhabitants who were sent to the
suburban termitaries.

As early as 1896 when the Municipality did not hesitate to demolish the old
"Porta dei Fabbri" (Smiths’ Gate) - at the crossing between Via De
Amicis and Via Carducci -, in spite of the contrary opinion of painter