YESMILANO WIRE, UPDATE JUNE 28TH 2021

This Week: Milano reborn and increasingly bike-friendly. Also, a new space dedicated to the art of recycling in North Milano

This week, 3 news items on the upcoming future of Milano and its metro community.

Milano is reborn this summer

Milano is currently undergoing a rebirth, as most restrictions are lifted and the mask mandate is suspended outdoors. There is no more curfew and the Darsena and the other night districts are alive with people and events. La Bella Estate, the municipality’s program of outdoor concerts and art exhibits, has kicked off. On the top terrace of Torre Velasca, one of Milano’s iconic skyscrapers, a concert of classical music by the Scala Orchestra has celebrated the start of renovation works which will end in 2023. Milano City Hall bathed itself in rainbow colors for the Pride Week culminating in the Pride LGBTQ+ demonstration at Arco della Pace which saw the participation of Mayor Sala. Men’s wear fashion has again filled showrooms and catwalks around Via Montenapoleone last week, with the New York Times speaking of a city renaissance. The green pass is now widespread among the Milanese citizenry and Covid-tested flights allow entrance into the country at Malpensa for holders of American, Canadian, Japanese, and Emirati passports with no quarantine and few hassles. Visit Milano now: it’s never been more beautiful or welcoming.

Milano has reinvented itself as a bike-friendly city

According to the London-based daily The Independent, Milano is weaning itself off combustion-engine culture by promoting bike travel. In fact, the municipality has used the time of the pandemic to accelerate the transition to green mobility by extending its bicycle lanes, for instance along Corso Buenos Aires – Viale Monza busy thoroughfare. Thus commented to the English newspaper Demetrio Scopelliti of the urban planning agency: “We were working on a blank page, which is something that for an urban planner never happens. We used the crisis to accelerate and foster a change that was already planned but needed to be pushed.” With the plan “Strade Aperte” (Open Roads), 35 km of new cycling lanes were added to the city map, while another 25 kilometers of roads were turned into reduced speed zones to give priority to pedestrian and bike traffic over car use.

The META recycle art space opens in North Milano

Domus, the international art and design magazine, has interviewed the creators of META, an unusual atelier in the Northern periphery of Milano, which collects discarded stands, props and exhibit materials and breathes into them a new life. Martina Bragadin and Margherita Crespi, trained at NABA in Milan, have set up a business based on the collection and sale of recycled materials. Their clients are the city’s fashion, design and art industries, which nnedd to find solutions to dispose of materials that are difficult to reuse. This is where META comes in, selecting and collecting materials, separating their components, cleaning and recycling them into new products. The duo then makes their creations available at affordable prices to new customers, including students, artists and professionals. As the two designers said to Domus: “The idea came about during the Milan Furniture Fair a few years ago, when the immense waste of materials used to build the stands, once they had been dismantled, led us to reflect on how we could intervene (..). The consideration also concerned our work as set designers, since we are aware of the costs of sets and their very short lives. Why does all this have to be waste, and why cannot it have another life?”.