The Greening of Milan: Porta Nuova and Vertical Forest
worldsensorium.com
worldsensorium.com
It's a luxury building in a luxury area.
I lived in Isola for a year around 2001 (piazza Minniti), and the direction of travel was already well-understood. Even the centro sociale squatters knew they were fighting a lost cause. I was back a couple of years ago and it's largely unrecognisable, with art galleries and real-estate agencies in place of cheap bakeries and northafrican takeaways. I got lost, and felt so depressed that I've never been back since.
I don’t think the problem is just the amount or cost of maintenance but how slow it is: the maintenance staff work on the outside of the building hanging from the top. Safety procedures alone would eat a lot into that work time.
Since this thing is unique, there's no statistics, and the cost can be declared ridiculously high. (Also an additional display of conspicuous consumption.)
> Periodically, a group of mountaineering arborists lowers themselves from the roofs of the two towers to tend to the plants, checking their health, and pruning or replacing them as needed.
Are these mountaineering arborists volunteering for the fun of it? Paid by the building management? Residents? If volunteers, it sounds like a fun activity but quite unsustainable for more than a handful of buildings. If paid (now or in the future), I'm quite curious what the average cost is and what the contingencies are for a lapse in maintenance due to change of ownership, rising cost leading to longer maintenance interval, etc. Maintaining the greenery is one aspect, but so is maintaining the concrete holding it up.
Despite my lack of optimism I do find it interesting to explore. Sometimes a few... mildly bourgeois... early demonstrations do provide the inspiration and requisite practical experience to get things rolling.
The landscaping project is sensational, but having vertical foliage as part of each level of housing I think is a short-term design ideal with medium-long term failure due to the reality of human interaction with their proximity. The extra work gives an initial hit of human pleasure, but it doesn't seem to play out as being worth it in terms of sustainability or emissions neutrality.
Milan is one of the most polluted cities of the western world (looking at the data[1]) and a literal death trap for cyclists and pedestrians. The numbers of car is out of control.
So... there is a long way to go to make it sustainable and environmentally friendly. Some token building for multi-millionaires doesn't really help, sorry.
[1] https://www.eea.europa.eu/themes/air/urban-air-quality/europ...
You can auto translate this from Italian for the details https://www.vice.com/it/article/bj7dn8/il-folle-progetto-di-...
The urban planning we have today, if we have anything we can even call urban planning, is often abysmal. Developers can basically build with no thought or care given to the long-term consequences of their actions (which, frankly, is what city planners should be concerned with, but alas).
One example: strip farmland, near or in cities, rezoned for development. Strip farmland is divided into narrow strips with unpaved country roads offering farm equipment access to the farmer's crop. This makes sense as narrow strips reduce the distance a farmer must travel down the country road to get to his plot. It also takes fewer turns of the farm equipment to harvest said crop.
The problem, however, is that developers then build for that narrow plot in isolation. That means a dead end street is paved off the (probably by now paved) country road. The process repeats as more farmers sell off their individual plots. The result is a comb configuration.
Why is this a problem? Well, because now you have all these little dead end streets that feed into one, long, skinny country road. Because of the lack of proper urban planning, residents are forced to drive to stores, work, schools, etc. because none of these were included by developers in these developments, leading to traffic congestion. And if they were included, it still sucks to navigate the terrain because the country road is the only traffic artery, and it risks turning into a so-called city "stroad" that is hostile to pedestrians.
You could mitigate this to some degree with some very modest regulation of land use. For example, the selective use of eminent domain to prevent building N meters from the narrow ends of the plot to allow for future street construction (to complete the comb into a grid) or non-residential buildings like stores, schools, and businesses.
Of course, developers can screw up large plots of land just as well, so at least the strip farm limits his reach. The point is that, whatever, the case, the city or town must not allow developers to _dictate_ urban planning.
But it's also really polluted because there are a bunch of really old heating systems. That would require almost zero planning, but it requires political will.
Granted, I was there for one week, but it was markedly different from any other large European city I’ve been to. I hope they install a few trees at street level and along the canal as well!
This is way more ignorant than it sounds.
Milan is full of parks, some incredibly vast (eg: parco lambro, bosco in città, parco trotter).
And a lot of roads are literally filled with trees (eg: via pacini and via lomellina).
Please grow up and stop relaying this ignorance.
In a typical dense forest, plants at the top of the canopy are probably not efficiently using all of the light they absorb, and much is lost to branches. Given how many plants can thrive without any direct sunlight, just having sunlight for half the day from an angle (a plant on one of the balconies) is probably forcing more efficiency and growth out of the plant relative to the amount of light energy it receives.
I suppose if the ground was covered in skyscrapers of comparable height, the effect would be more or less neutralized by the shade from neighboring buildings.
For a look into the benefits of living near green space (ie nature contact):
https://www.internationaljournalofwellbeing.org/index.php/ij...
Indoor plants also have salutary and performance effects.
If by "glass desert" you mean that it's full of buildings covered in glass, then I suggest you actually visit Milan, because here it's really the opposite.
Just really to show my point: https://ibb.co/xhnnjtM, no glass desert of course, the other side has the park
And your defence for that neighborhood seems to be "hey look the other neighborhood on it's side is not that bad"
So, yaeah.
When you're just talking in reality about two residential buildings and they are nightmares because these two residential buildings have no establishments (and no I cannot recross the road).