Stefano DI VITA, DASTU - Politecnico di Milano, Italy
The paper aims at framing the discourse of spatial justice by focusing on urban policy and planning. Specifically, it questions if and how strategies and mechanisms of urban policy and planning may (re)produce spatial injustice. In the last decades, processes of financialisation of urban agendas and space (Briata & Raco, forth), as well as the attraction of wealthy populations (Atkinson, 2020) have led global cities to reinforce the contradiction of a two-tiered planning system that tends to bypass the redistributive function. Big capitals are considered as a precondition to bringing “regeneration” in existing or forthcoming centralities, whereas residual “special plans” and initiatives labelled within the rhetoric of social innovation are promoted in deprived areas.
The recent debates on alpha cities are relevant not only because the problematic aspects related to the super-rich presence in global metropoles are highlighted, but also because they show how much “central” and “peripheral” areas are strictly interconnected systems that should be planned as such.
These issues will be unpacked through the case of Milan’s metropolitan area that is experiencing peculiar processes of alpha territorialisation (Webber, Burrows, 2016) as well as new forms of peripheralisation. Before and despite the pandemic, Milan has become a very attractive city for international investors. For a long time, local administrations have opted for elite capture at any cost (Pasqui, 2018), without coupling it with any form of value-capture to be invested in redistributive action. In the context of political changes and institutional reforms, Milan metropolitan area is a good case to discuss processes taking place in central-alpha and peripheral areas as interconnected systems. These nexuses should drive spatial analyses, strategies and mechanisms, beyond the still ongoing territorial and administrative fragmentation between Municipality and Metropolitan City (Di Vita, 2020).
Mots clés : Alpha territorialisation|New forms of peripheralisation|socio-spatial polarisation |spatial policies|Milan
A104945PB