Practicing a Polycentric (Post) Metropolis: a Dialogue about the Milan Urban Region

The present booklet reports discussions and reflections with Professor Alessandro Balducci on the potential contributions of planners to challenges posed by current processes of regional urbanization (in terms of governance, inhabitants’ quality of life, economic growth, environmental processes for public agendas). Authors reflect on their personal experiences, exploring the practicalities and the societal and physical impacts of their research and work. As an alumnus of the Politecnico di Milano, an Italian planner, a DAStU-PoliMI researcher, an AESOP Young Academic, and a member of the Società Italiana degli Urbanisti, I have long known the importance of Professor Balducci’s work in planning studies, but I had never directly worked with him until this book. I am in a similar position as the reader, seeking to discover more about an important figure of the planning field, to understand the reasons and key ideas that influenced his practice. In his recent work – especially on the need for innovation in the transformation of current cities (PRIN 2005-2007) and on sustainability, habitability, and governability in emerging urban forms (PRIN 2010-2011) – Professor Balducci has defined original approaches and terminology for working on contemporary cities, focusing particularly on the Italian context and, especially, on Milan Urban Region. During three long interviews, I had the chance to discuss these issues with Professor Balducci, and to situate them within current disciplinary discourse, with reference to his publications. In these dialogues, he shares memories, experiences, and anecdotes that allow the reader to appreciate how his role as both a planner (scholar, practitioner and policy maker) and an inhabitant allowed him to practice the city in many different ways. Yet the focus of the book is not biographic or self-referential. These dialogues explore the richness of Balducci’s experience to first help readers understand his area of focus, and then explore how he contributed in the comprehension and transformation of a specific territory. His example shows how planners interact with territorial needs and re-framing disciplinary knowledge, contributed to future developments of places. The Milan Urban Region (MUR) is used here as a case study to explore characteristics of post-metropolitan territories and a local declination of regional dynamics of urbanization, their socio-economic, regulatory, institutional, and governance impacts. According to Mela (2005, pp. 8-9), to understand contemporary processes of urbanization, one must focus on the phenomenology of practices, their complex spatial and temporal geographies, their interrelatedness and continuous dynamics, their unpredictability, but also the routine character into which they are channeled, due also to the technology and organizational forms that make the ordinary functioning of the city possible