Milan Expo(sed) – Fashion takes a back seat in the 2015 Expo planning

By: Roberto Priolo, Freelance Writer & Journalist.

Wander around Milan these days, and all you’ll see are road works and towering cranes. The capital of Lombardia is getting fit and ready for the 2015 Expo, a six-month event that promises to bring over 29 million visitors and generate revenues of €40bn for the local economy.

With these numbers, there is a lot of interest in making sure the event is a success. Milan, known for not being exactly the prettiest of Italian cities, is going through a dramatic make-over, with most areas seeing new developments and entire neighbourhood rapidly changing.

The Bureau International des Expositions declared Milan the winner of the competition to host the Expo on March 31, 2008. Immediately, master plans and new projects were presented to the press and the public. For a few months, it looked like the metropolis was going to be transformed so radically it would be impossible to recognize. Almost three years later, though, reality looks rather different.

Initial projects included, among others, a huge exhibition area with pavilions and fountains, new underground lines, high-rise buildings, the transformation of the Navigli area that would make the canals navigable again and the construction of la Città della Moda, the City of Fashion.

The “three towers”, part of the Citylife project, are attractive skyscrapers projected by Zaha Hadid, Arata Isozaki and Daniel Libeskind, that will represent a fine example of urban renewal in the Fiera di Milano area. The towers were conceived to house offices, but they are likely to end up as housing, because the requests for office space was too little given the current economic climate. Residential buildings and parks will still be an important part of the complex, with apartments sold at €8.500 per square metre on average. The construction of the Citylife complex is running, but the other projects are not being as lucky.

Take public transportation, for example. The Milanese area is currently served by a network of three underground lines, the MM1 (red), the MM2 (green) and the MM3 (yellow). For years, there have been rumours – and hopes – about the construction of extra lines, in a city with serious traffic issues and that at night looks like a gigantic rummage sale of cars, with vehicles parked anywhere possible, including pavements.

When Milan won the Expo, at least two new lines were announced. The MM4 would run from Linate airport to the other edge of town, passing through the city centre, while the MM5 would connect Bignami, in the north, with San Siro stadium, touching key areas in Milan such as the important Bicocca university, the densely populated viale Fulvio Testi, Garibaldi station and the three towers.

Considering that works to add two stations to the southern end of the green line have been going on for about five years, it seems somehow unlikely that the new lines will see the light of day any time soon. The only exception seems to be the first part of the MM5, running from Bignami to Garibaldi station: for years, busy roads like Viale Zara and Viale Fulvio Testi have been slaughtered, creating several problems to the thousands of people travelling every day from Milan to the northen outskirts and back. At least, these few stations will be fully operating in a few months.

If the rest of the MM5 is still a possibility (people will need to reach those three skyscrapers somehow), the construction of the MM4 will probably start after 2015, to avoid presenting visitors with a city devastated by road works (or more probably because there is no money at all to start): the Expo went from being a catalyst for the improvement of Milan’s public transport system to being the reason why works cannot start. Who knows what visitors will think when they’ll see an MM5, but not an MM4.

Still, if you walk around Milan, you cannot help but notice a lot of action going on on building sites throughout the city. The new building of the regional government has recently been completed, and it is a truly magnificent addition to the city’s skyline; two of Milan’s landmarks, the Duomo and the Central station, have recently gone through extensive make-overs of their own. The church was restored and is now as shiny as it was when it was first completed, while the station was renovated and transformed into the functional and beautiful transportation hub a city like Milan deserves.

Those loving Milan for being a fashion capital will be disappointed too, as the much talked-about Città della Moda project will simply not happen. Initially intended to give new life to the run-down area around Garibaldi station, the project was going to feature high buildings, parks and, most importantly, a museum of fashion (the MODAM) and a fashion school. The site was presented on newspapers and the internet as a grand celebration of Milan’s biggest asset, fashion.

The buildings are indeed being built. In fact, they are almost finished, but it is hard to say what they will be used for. According to both the Expo press office and the firm working on the building site, the Città della Moda project is not going to be created anymore – those buildings are likely to end up housing hotels, apartments and offices – hardly something the city needs right now. There isn’t much clarity around this project: it was widely advertised as a €680m development that would be a focal point in the city’s landscape (its location is the natural extension of trendy Corso Como and fashionable Corso Garibaldi).

The project is now known as Porta Nuova. It will probably be ready in a few months, but it’s not clear what it will be. As it often happens in Italy, new structures are built before their final use is determined. It doesn’t come entirely as a surprise, considering that, up until mid-October, the Expo itself was not considered a sure thing: the city of Milan needed to secure the areas on which to develop the projects presented to the International Committee. There was speculation about Izmir, the other finalist in the competition for the 2015 Expo, already having a back-up plan to submit to the Committee in case Milan failed. It didn’t.

We’ll have to wait to see whether the 2015 event will be a success. Rather than announcing gigantic new developments and radical changes to the way the city is lived, Milan should concentrate on more feasible and necessary actions. It doesn’t need new boutique hotels and skyscrapers. They are most welcome, but there are more pressing issues that need to be tackled, like the improvement of the public transport system, the reduction of congestion in the city centre and the creation of more green areas.
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Roberto Priolo is a London-based freelance writer. He specialises in lifestyle and travel, but has also written about business and culture. He contributes amongst others to the Sunday Times, Food and Travel, in-flight magazine Ling, trade magazine The Manufacturer and a local weekly newspaper in rural California.