Giuseppe Marinoni, architect and urban designer, has published Milano la verde, the book in which he analyses the practices that have contributed to the evolution of Milan's urban form from the 1970s to the present day. With a passion for city design strategy and the relationship between open spaces and the built environment, after completing his doctorate in Urban Design and Policies he won, together with Pierluigi Nicolin, the competition for the Garibaldi-Repubblica area, and was brought in by the Municipality of Milan to develop the base masterplan — the implementation plan for the Porta Nuova area. We met him to discuss Milan's green projects and the form of the city of the future, two closely connected themes.

What distinguishes the figure of the urban designer from that of the architect-planner?
Rather than an architect or a planner, I would describe myself as an "urban designer" — a figure that is fairly well established abroad and has its own specific identity, whereas in Italy it moves somewhat between the disciplines of architecture and urban planning without a clearly defined identity of its own. The urban designer is someone who thinks about the city in terms of open spaces, and who sets out to give it form by starting precisely from the idea of conceiving open space as both public and private. In a sense, then, buildings that are required to have a particular architectural character must respond to a set of settlement principles, so that open space can be created.

In the Anglo-Saxon tradition there is the urban designer, although this figure starts from the shaping of buildings, whereas the European tradition found in France, Germany and the Netherlands starts from the definition of open spaces. I identify more with this approach, and above all with the idea of conceiving an urban project as a flexible one. You do not define the form of the buildings; instead, you define principles that will then serve as a guide for the design of buildings conceived by different architects, under the design coordination generally carried out by the urban designer, who becomes the coordinator of these parts of the city.

Milan is "the green city", yet in your view it lacks an overall vision for the city project — something that, by contrast, exists in other European contexts. Why?
Milan lacks an overall vision for the city, even though it is at the forefront of everything that is happening in Italy. Or rather, of what is not happening in all other Italian cities, with perhaps the exception of Turin — partly because there is no property market as buoyant as Milan's, and partly because the current agents of urban transformation are investors, and both foreign and Italian investors regard Milan as the only attractive market worth investing in.

The problem of the lack of strategic vision is not exclusively Milanese — it is predominantly Italian, and is linked to how the urban planning discipline is conceived. Even today, we understand urban planning as the structuring of regulations. All legislation, both national and regional, seeks to promote master plans or, as they are called in Lombardy, pgt (piani di governo del territorio — territorial governance plans) as normative instruments on which to decide the fate of the city. In other countries it works differently: there is strategic planning, or qualitative oversight of transformations. Strategic in the sense that it expresses the content of urban policies — where a given city should be heading — and this is combined with urban projects: how and in what form this high-level political vision should be translated into the fabric of the city, that is, open spaces and urban spaces.

An example of what an urban policy looks like: Frankfurt, a city that is not particularly beautiful and that in the 1980s still bore the heavy marks of the poorly executed reconstruction of the post-war period. The city administration decided that Frankfurt should become the financial hub of continental Europe. In the end, they partly succeeded. They attracted banks, the European Central Bank. The city did not manage to win the competition with London, which remains the most important financial centre in Europe and globally, but it did become a significant financial hub. To achieve that goal, the city — which until then had been little more than a small town in the German provinces — needed to change its image. Around two hundred skyscrapers were built during those years, loosely following the models of Manhattan and Canary Wharf, which was being built in London at the time. Political and urban projects were implemented that converged in ensuring the city made a qualitative leap in terms of its international appeal, its image and its architectural quality.

That is the difference. Frankfurt carried out projects to bring its vision to life, not merely laws and regulations as would have been the case in Italy. What we lack is the ability to give strategic value to the urban project as the foundation for high-level urban policies — which is the responsibility of administrations — while at the same time reflecting on the forms of the city.

So is it necessary to have a clear political project upstream — a vision of what the city should become — before thinking about its form?
The form of the city becomes an expression of the forms of its policies.

What will Milan become over the next thirty years, and what form will it take?
We cannot keep assuming that Milan's form is, in a sense, an almost random product of various investors who at one moment want to build tall, at another moment low, and at yet another moment arm-wrestle with the administration over how much green space to include. There needs to be a project for the form as well — one that symbolically expresses those values.

In my view, this is not yet happening. If we look at the new pgt 2030, it consists purely of intentions and, more often than not, revolves around what might be called a "verdolatrous" trend: if you talk about greenery everything is fine, but if you talk about the form of the city — which must also be realised in part through the built environment — you immediately get labelled as being in the pocket of the property sector. The city must also be built using the resources of guided property investment. Unfortunately, this is not yet visible in Milan.

Is this an economic definition problem?
Not only — it is also a symbolic and design problem. What does Milan want to become in twenty or thirty years? Milan has fashion, design, pharmaceuticals, the healthcare city. Milan is many cities; it is the capital of publishing and of the economy in Italy, with many facets. The challenge would be to understand how to seize these opportunities and project them onto the international stage. This has happened in an almost accidental way, because investors are drawn to Milan. There are private, public and foreign investment funds wanting to invest hundreds of millions. It would be an opportunity if all this could be channelled into a vision for the city's symbolic and strategic relaunch, thinking about its extended boundaries. For now, the metropolitan city is still a ghost. If all of this were embedded within a symbolic vision of the city, it could be an opportunity to rethink the vision of the city as a whole. What I keep insisting on is that high-level policies must be intertwined with the idea of giving form to the city — with urban morphology and the qualitative design of the city.

The public vision cannot be built on the occasional proposals put forward by private actors — the "leopard spots" that Gian Arturo Ferrari describes in the book, which ultimately make the leopard's pattern disappear altogether. It comes down to a question of general culture. On the one hand, Italy still clings to the idea that urban planning is done through regulations. That may govern the physiology of a city, but it does not give a city its form — and form can only be achieved by formulating strategic visions.

Many European cities speak of strategic objectives running through to 2050. Often, particularly in cities that have expanded to a metropolitan scale — such as Paris or Amsterdam — urban policies are closely linked to infrastructural transformations, meaning that understanding how the public transport system evolves and is expanded becomes essential. What is needed are urban designers, not merely architects who put up buildings and urban planners who believe the problem is simply one of regulating the city through rules and legislation.

In your book Milano la verde you discuss the recent rediscovery of water — something the city seemed to have forgotten for a very long time…
Today Milan, a city of water that, despite floating above a network of canals and natural springs, had for over a century appeared to have forgotten its irrigating nature, has rediscovered water as a resource to safeguard and preserve. It is no coincidence that in recent years, alongside the urban forestry and green-space preservation interventions inaugurated with Boscoincittà, projects tied to the theme of water have also emerged. By reinterpreting in poetic terms even the practical questions surrounding the regulation of watercourses and springs, genuine landscape scenarios have been created — such as the Parco delle Cave, which managed to transform a territory depleted by extraction activities carried out in past years without the necessary environmental sensitivity into a landscape that is certainly unprecedented in the vicinity of Milan's city centre. And this rediscovery of water can also be found in the recent works designed by Carlo Masera at Parco Nord, where artificial water basins — the largest in Milan after the historic Idroscalo — help to regulate the waters of the river Seveso while simultaneously encouraging new uses and renewing the landscape's image.

The positive transformation of the urban allotment phenomenon is also a noteworthy development…
Once unauthorised elements that for years contributed to the degradation of residual areas and infrastructure fringes, urban allotments have — in contemporary thinking, and also thanks to quality design and skilled management of self-build processes — come to distinguish themselves as elements of landscape enhancement and social regeneration across large portions of parks.

There are differing views on the project to transform the disused railway yards: what is your position?
The floor area ratio defines how many square metres of built surface can be realised in relation to the total land area: in Milan, for the railway yards project, we have a generalised ratio of 0.5 — which is very low. In cities such as Paris, Amsterdam, London, or even cities smaller in scale than Milan such as Barcelona, Munich and Cologne, railway yards typically concentrate high densities of built volume, roughly four times the floor area ratios applied to the Milan yards. For the simple reason that railway yards are already extensively served by infrastructure, given that they are generally located in the city centre due to their historical origins and have been absorbed by urbanisation; trains serve them, they are connected to the transport network; through a whole series of circumstances, the metro often reaches them too, so they are interconnected with the urban transport system. In general, the railway yards of all cities, as those cities have evolved, are the locations most accessible via both urban and extra-urban public transport. They are also areas situated within the built-up urban fabric.

In my view, a higher floor area ratio should be adopted. In Europe we have cases where, over the past twenty years, high-quality sections of cities have been built with a floor area ratio four or five times higher than Milan's. Perhaps, for the railway yards, it would have been wiser to follow the example of these foreign cities. These are parts of cities already under construction, so it is possible to assess the morphological and social benefits of such outcomes: virtuous examples of new centralities conceived along the principles of the compact city, where the morphological richness enabled by quality urban, architectural and landscape design generates urban spaces such as tree-lined avenues, squares, parks and gardens.

A compact city with high physical density and high social and functional intensity, with a mix of uses: housing, offices, retail, public institutions, universities and contemporary landmarks. These virtuous examples could readily have been applied to Milan as well, with an eye to its transformation over the coming decades — including under the hypothesis of future growth in inhabitants and city users, if the growth forecasts associated with major European and global cities hold true for Milan as well.

What is your vision for the city's development in the coming years?
The projection of many studies is that by 2050, 70 per cent of the world's population will be living in cities. We must accept that these cities need to grow in terms of inhabitants, and if we do not want to expand the city's perimeter, we are obliged to densify it by building on so-called brown fields — decommissioned, industrial areas, of which there are almost none left in Milan, except for military barracks and railway yards. If we think of the railway yards as a place for greenery and a few modest volumes, then we are not thinking with any foresight about eco-sustainable growth.

An ecological way forward is to ensure that people live more concentrated lives, work where they live, and find everything they need — leisure, recreation, everyday life in general — within the city, so that they need to move around as little as possible. It is said that cities are energy-hungry, and that is true, but energy consumption and pollution are more attributable to movement. For urban planners, what consumes the most energy is so-called sprawl (an urban phenomenon characterised by the rapid and disorderly growth of city areas) — detached houses scattered everywhere, in short what happened in America in the 1950s. It is land consumption, but also an energy-intensive model of territorial development. It is therefore necessary to concentrate city inhabitants. For the railway yards, a strategic vision would mean concentrating high built volumes there in order to preserve the surrounding territory. Scientific studies are, however, demonstrating that large belt parks, when connected to the agricultural system and to large territorial parks, help to rebalance the terrestrial ecosystem, while urban gardens serve primarily to improve the quality of daily life for the population.

What is your view on urban forestry?
The idea of urban forestry comes predominantly from Asian megacities with populations of ten million or more. There, the distance between a hypothetical geographical centre and the surrounding countryside is thirty kilometres or more. It is clear that in those places urban forestry projects make sense, because the aim is to carve out large unbuilt green areas within an extremely dense urban fabric. It is a bit like saying Central Park in relation to Manhattan, which is twenty kilometres long by ten wide. Without Central Park it would obviously have no green space at all. But in Milan, from Piazza del Duomo to the Parco Sud Agricolo Milano — one of the largest agricultural parks in Europe — it is only four kilometres, and equally short distances separate it from Parco Nord Milano, Boscoincittà and Parco Forlanini. These are the true "green lungs": by virtue of their size and physical continuity with the surrounding countryside and the regional parks system, they genuinely contribute to environmental reb