Page 34 - Milano Periferia

pre-historical legal regulations with regard to landed property, for which
the right of building would be connaturated with the right of property, "so
that Italy with her thirty million hectares could legally put up three thousand
million or more of inhabitants, as many as are now scattered on the whole
planet"; there they are to witness a disatomized and shattered urban
aggregate, such as was wanted by the invisible and sovereign power of
the Building Societies; there they are to witness, in conclusion, the end,
the destruction of the town not so much as the utopy of a monocentric
organism, well arranged and static around the cross of cardo and decu-
manus, with its doors and its walls (such as it had been from ancient
Greece up to the 19th century) as the end of a possession, the impossibi-
lity I do not say of inhabiting it, but of seeing it, of accepting it, of running
across it though amid the forest of the direction arrows, even of administer-
ing it, so much it has grown without a rational control, so much it evolves
spreading like an oil-stain, hyper-self-building and at the same time self-
destroying.

The outskirts of today also deny the balance of relations between soil,
water, atmosphere, vegetable and animal. After expropriating culture, they
have expropriated also nature, miseducating to its respect the very young,
and the landscape which on the outskirts of yesterday still breathed around
the houses today has become cosmetics, ornament of scrubby trees in a
few square metres, of tiny "robinsons" (small gardens) as at Gratosoglio,
to be looked at, but not to be trampled on (*); while the real countryside
sadly begins with already dry meadows, full of brushwood and all other
rubbish.

They euphemistically call them garden-quarters, huge aggregations of
thirty or forty very tall buildings, all tiled and shiny, overlooking invisible
grass enclosures.

The concrete, the smog now dyossine-scented, the advertisements decorat-
ing the facades and moreover the indifference, the isolation, the alienation
due to the technological development are all terms which can be coupled
with the outskirts of today: each of them proposes an unsolved problem.

Their "heart" has emigrated elsewhere, but where?

It is necessary to take part in the "Stramilano" long walk to find a shop
or a pleasant bar, when living in certain quarters with too excessive build-
ings, deprived of meeting-centres; thence the necessity more and more felt
of socialization preached by the quarter committees and by the various
collectives, what, in truth, still testifies the needs of the old outskirts, above
all that of amalgamating the social classes and of saving the individual,
driving him out of his defected "apartheid", made up with television sets
and lifts in minimum spaces.

(*) See the keen comment by the already quoted Bernacchi.