An inclusive, multilevel planning experience to regenerate metropolitan peripheries in Milan

“Metropolitan welfare and urban regeneration” is the project that the Metropolitan City Authority of Milan is carring out thanks to a National funding by the Infrastructure Ministery of the Central State aiming at developing deprived areas over the country. The program to develop metropolitan peripheries of Milan has chosen the topic of inclusivness as the key to interpret both the issue of peripheries and the idea of urban regeneration. Its target is to transform marginal places into the pivots of a territorial and social infrastructure to build a new livability of the metropolitan suburbs, through a multilevel planning tool that involves the environmental level - promoting accessibility and sustainable mobility -, the housing inclusion level, and the cultural and social promotion level. It is mainly addressing the vulnerable groups of the population, and at the same time it aims at the construction of nodes of attractions for all the citizens. The paper presents this extraordinary urban planning tool in the framework of Italian urban policies, through two main perspectives. The first concerns the innovative approach of governance proposed by a program that experiments new relationships at the metropolitan scale, with 6 aggregations of 31 Municipalities together with different actors: institutions and communities, agencies of transport, cultural associations, private social, and many different partners, in an “open network” logic. The second perspective deals with the issue of integration as a fundamental criteria into a planning tool aimed at responding to the current challenges. It has in fact tried to stress the interaction already existing from the geographical, infrastructural, social points of view, but which is not yet acquired in urban planning, with an articulated system of material and immaterial actions, aimed at making urban regeneration, together with social inclusion, the core of a work of total rethinking of the metropolitan peripheries