Page 33 - Milano Periferia

Conconi and Luca Beltrami, then during the years of Fascism (*) to arrive
especially to 1960, a disastrous year when as many as 8.000 lodgings were
demolished on the ground of speculative criteria of economic triumphalism
irreparable damage has been inflicted, continual modifications have been
brought about, distorting the urban setting. It has been ascertained that
60% of the Milan historical centre, including the warmer and more solitary
outskirts, has disappeared due to the robbery of speculators not controlled
enough by the municipal prohibitions, however severe, or has been
destroyed by a violent and heedless urbanization.

It is also necessary to say (and I should only be glad to be mistaken) that
never until 1976 there were social town-planning laws, as in certain other
foreign countries, by which it could have been possible to oppose more
radically private speculation.

In more than thirty years of political democratic life, the new outskirts,
compared with those of yesterday, express the dissonance, the casualness,
the formless, erupted by the extemporary tremors of a crater. The
"Bauhaus" has been founded in vain, many town-planners and commit-
ted sociologists have written admirable pages, refined theories, which are
at the base optimistic, on the rational and harmonious development of the
town "to the size of man"; let them come to see how reality has defeated
them. The outskirts of Milan, as evidence of fine forfeited theories, do not
differentiate any more from those of Turin and of many other industrial
towns spread all over the world: there they are to witness a people taken
by the throat who lacked the time to programme its development; there
they are to witness the inability to manage an architectural space of its
own, placing the community before private interests; there they are to
witness the needs faced singularly when they have already reached a
critical and breaking-off point; there they are to witness the frenzy of
immediate survival, the urgency of the moment, when the house is needed,
at any cost, not to die, not to be bled by the vultures dropping on the
national soil which ought to be a collective patrimony; there they are to
witness the cynicism or rather the indifference of the ruling Bodies and
also the retrograde haughtiness of certain architects, like ours, deaf to
sociality, still sick with Renaissance formalism and all intent to career,
refractory to the team work, incurable in pursuing the ambition of literally
absolute "masterpieces"; there they are to witness the bad faith and the
roughness of many local administrators continually practising the patroniz-
ing and electoral compromise, so as to increase, to their liking, the living
capacities of the joint-property buildings rising on their soils; there they
are to witness, according to A. Cederna’s bitter and sharp judgement, the

(*) In the vivid and well-documented text by Bernacchi which accompanies the photo-
graphs it is possible to obtain a great deal of information about the demolitions carried
out by Mussolini’s regime with racialist aims, as well as about the fascist townplanning
causing so much damage and harm.