Housing policy is a bet on trust and jobs. Ultimately, it challenges quality of life and democracy
The Romans, if they were eloquent people (eu loquere, with the eu meaning well and therefore distinguishing the eloquentes from the simple loquentes, chatterboxes who often speak nonsense), loved to express themselves like Cicero, Tacitus or Seneca, with propriety of language and precision. To name what we now call a ‘city’, they used two different words. They used urbs to refer to the physical structures: the streets and squares, the palaces and baths, the temples and theatres, the markets and houses. They referred to people gathered in communities as civitas, a community of cives, or citizens, who were linked by common values and interests (often not without conflict), as well as by language, habits, myths, customs and rules.
This is a subtle, elegant distinction between ‘urban’ and ‘citizenship’. But it also indicates all the points in common through the differences. The urbs is inhabited by the cives, and the two interact for better or worse. Centuries of urban civilisation and ‘civil’ questions tell us that beautiful cities can improve the human, professional and cultural qualities of their inhabitants. To quote just one example from the many pages of great literature on the subject, here is Elio Vittorini‘s poetic summary from Le Città del Mondo (The Cities of the World): ‘It is the most beautiful city we have ever seen. More beautiful than Piazza Armerina. More than Caltagirone. More than Ragusa, Nicosia and Enna… Perhaps it is the most beautiful city in the world. People are happy in beautiful cities, and the more beautiful the city, the more beautiful its people, as if the air were better there.’
Like that of Sciascia and Pirandello, Vittorini’s Sicily is a metaphor for other conditions, places and tensions. However, Vittorini, who left Sicily and then lived happily in Milan after a period in Florence, grasped an essential point in the relationship between the beauty of the urbs and quality of life, and between urban functions and the complex of rules (not only legal ones, but also civil and community ones) that inspire, organise and guide communal life.
This highlights some of the characteristics that we call ‘attractiveness’ today and emphasises the tensions, conflicts and harshness of transformations. It also offers hope and shows the constraints, as described by Pier Paolo Pasolini in his depiction of the discomfort of the suburbs, Luciano Bianciardi‘s ‘bitter life’, and Italo Calvino‘s recollection of a city’s failed responses to many expectations. Not to mention the criminal gloom of the ‘metropolis of a thousand lights’, as depicted in the noir novels of Alessandro Robecchi, Gianni Biondillo, Francesco Recami and Piero Colaprico, good successors to Giorgio Scerbanenco, who wrote that ‘the Milanese kill on Saturdays’. These are just a few metaphors of an urban condition whose underlying characteristic is a controversial and harsh relationship with complexity, imbalances and a painful perception of human existence. aggravated by particular urban conditions.
The ‘rising city’, so beloved of certain rhetoric (of which Boccioni‘s genius was completely innocent), is also the city that, at certain junctures, reeks of hell.
It is worth bearing in mind this conceptual and poetic backdrop, particularly as the debate on cities is gaining traction in the media and political circles. The focus is on the most striking phenomena, such as security, the cost of living, widening social disparities and the difficult integration of immigrants. These are all serious and real issues that profoundly affect the sensibilities, fears and judgements of cives and voters, yet the underlying reasons between innovation and conservation that have always characterised the ‘city phenomenon’ are avoided.
Cities, particularly metropolitan areas, the ‘large cities’, are living, complex organisms that are subject to market pressures, as well as the challenges of urban planning and political leadership. They are the epitome of modernity: impetuous and innovative, and therefore in many ways anarchic and intolerant of plans and rules. Yet they are also sensitive archives of history, with ageing social classes who prefer the elegant, memory-filled form of the traditional urbs.
Milan, Greater Milan, the metropolitan city, the ‘infinite city’, is an excellent example of this. It is more attractive than other Italian cities because it is the only truly European city. It attracts people, intelligence, productive ideas, the cultural avant-garde, capital, businesses and innovations. The rest of Italy is, after all, a large province which often views Milan with suspicion and hostility, even if it is fascinated by it. Its population is growing, thanks in part to over 230,000 university students (making it the largest university city in Italy) and it is a favourite destination for the nouveau riche, who can enjoy favourable tax rates (200,000 euros a year and more) as well as an excellent quality of life with luxury shopping and exclusive clubs. Multinationals are flocking here (34% of all foreign companies in Italy are based in Milan) and real estate investors are pouring in, with billions of euros worth of investment.
But is this enough? Of course not. The fabric of a city isn’t made up of the highest-ranking figures, billionaires and the most creative ‘talent’ and ‘excellences’ (even the rhetoric of ‘talent’ and ‘excellences’ has done its damage, as has the obsession with locations and ‘exclusive’ events). However, it is sustained by a sizeable middle class comprising working individuals and families, growing couples, professors, artists, journalists, managers, labourers, tram drivers, shopkeepers and office workers. The middle classes. People.
All these social groups need homes and services. The urbs‘ structures and the civitas‘ civic values of integration are needed as cement, as well as good reformist politics.
In the 1950s, Italy experienced a significant social exodus, with millions of people moving from the impoverished south and the impoverished north-east towards cities undergoing major industrial development, beginning with the Milan-Turin-Genoa ‘triangle’. People also moved from impoverished, laborious rural areas to the cities in other parts of the country. This was an extraordinary and impetuous transformation for cities, communities and social contexts, and attempts were made to manage the phenomenon with ambitious projects. One example was the ‘Piano Casa’ (Housing Plan), launched in 1949 by Amintore Fanfani, who was then Minister of Labour. This plan aimed to build 350,000 new housing units by 1963, and was accompanied by the strengthening of the INA Casa (National Housing Institute) and a vigorous cooperative movement. The underlying idea was to build new social and middle-class housing estates. However, these projects were far from flawless and had their limitations and errors (there was also massive speculation in the building industry by ‘hands on the city’, which was often criminal and involved the mafia). Then there was the profoundly reformist land law, designed to promote orderly development free from speculators, which was signed by Christian Democrat minister Fiorentino Sullo in 1963. This law was at the root of the first major crisis of the centre-left government led by Aldo Moro, which had just been formed in October 1963. But cities continued to grow, and Italians became a nation of homeowners, seeking security.
However, this was not without its shadows and mistakes: Baggio and Quarto Oggiaro in Milan, Falchera in Turin, Corviale in Rome, CEP and Zen in Palermo, Librino in Catania and Le Vele in Scampia are names that have come to symbolise poor, sloppy and mediocre social urban planning. Roberto Guiducci has written lucid and insightful pages on this subject in several books and in the introductory pages of the Pirelli magazine.
Today, this issue is back in the news, and it is a European issue. All large cities are suffering greatly when it comes to affordable housing, especially for the younger generations, for young couples in London or Madrid, Paris, Frankfurt, Barcelona, Amsterdam or Milan who want to build a future where knowledge, innovation and relationships are concentrated, and where quality of life is high. ‘The European plan for 650,000 homes a year is starting’, writes Il Sole 24 Ore on 16 December, describing an EU Commission programme that aims to mobilise €153 billion every twelve months.
If Europe’s future in terms of security, technology, real sustainability and innovation is to be based on the ‘knowledge economy’, it is precisely the younger generations that we must look to, starting with providing them with affordable housing and services, integration and the development of job and career opportunities.
The same reasoning applies to Italy and Milan. Following a decision by Mayor Beppe Sala‘s council, the city is discussing a new housing plan to build 10,000 new homes per year for ten years, using public and private resources. The plan also encourages companies to consider housing as a welfare option for their employees. Assolombarda has made this a priority, and ATM is already well ahead in this regard in order to retain bus, tram and underground drivers in the city. In addition, 28,000 Aler homes (managed by the municipality and the region) need to be restored and renovated to make them available to low-income citizens.
It is worth repeating: Milan is not a ‘model’, but it is undergoing profound social change. While it is a market city, it cannot be left solely to the market. It needs effective urban and housing policies, and it must revive its traditions of productivity and social inclusion, both economic and social. Everything is connected: young people’s employment prospects, wages, opportunities for women to advance in their careers and decent pensions (Il Giorno, 21 December). The key issues are balanced development, social equity, and rebuilding confidence in a better future.
Ultimately, it is a question of democracy. Once again, we see the relationship between urbs and civitas. It is about housing policy, with quality construction and affordable purchase prices. It is an idea of Milan where citizens work, but also go to the theatre, listen to music, play sports, visit bookshops and consume and learn. Thanks to social policies, they can also think about having children, safe in the knowledge that they can rely on schools, hospitals and nurseries.
Vittorini was absolutely right when he wrote about the connection between beautiful cities and beautiful people. His son, full of enthusiasm, asks his father, who is lost in thought as he looks at a woman preparing the oven, ‘Was my mother beautiful?’ She certainly made good bread.
(Photo Getty Images)
The Romans, if they were eloquent people (eu loquere, with the eu meaning well and therefore distinguishing the eloquentes from the simple loquentes, chatterboxes who often speak nonsense), loved to express themselves like Cicero, Tacitus or Seneca, with propriety of language and precision. To name what we now call a ‘city’, they used two different words. They used urbs to refer to the physical structures: the streets and squares, the palaces and baths, the temples and theatres, the markets and houses. They referred to people gathered in communities as civitas, a community of cives, or citizens, who were linked by common values and interests (often not without conflict), as well as by language, habits, myths, customs and rules.
This is a subtle, elegant distinction between ‘urban’ and ‘citizenship’. But it also indicates all the points in common through the differences. The urbs is inhabited by the cives, and the two interact for better or worse. Centuries of urban civilisation and ‘civil’ questions tell us that beautiful cities can improve the human, professional and cultural qualities of their inhabitants. To quote just one example from the many pages of great literature on the subject, here is Elio Vittorini‘s poetic summary from Le Città del Mondo (The Cities of the World): ‘It is the most beautiful city we have ever seen. More beautiful than Piazza Armerina. More than Caltagirone. More than Ragusa, Nicosia and Enna… Perhaps it is the most beautiful city in the world. People are happy in beautiful cities, and the more beautiful the city, the more beautiful its people, as if the air were better there.’
Like that of Sciascia and Pirandello, Vittorini’s Sicily is a metaphor for other conditions, places and tensions. However, Vittorini, who left Sicily and then lived happily in Milan after a period in Florence, grasped an essential point in the relationship between the beauty of the urbs and quality of life, and between urban functions and the complex of rules (not only legal ones, but also civil and community ones) that inspire, organise and guide communal life.
This highlights some of the characteristics that we call ‘attractiveness’ today and emphasises the tensions, conflicts and harshness of transformations. It also offers hope and shows the constraints, as described by Pier Paolo Pasolini in his depiction of the discomfort of the suburbs, Luciano Bianciardi‘s ‘bitter life’, and Italo Calvino‘s recollection of a city’s failed responses to many expectations. Not to mention the criminal gloom of the ‘metropolis of a thousand lights’, as depicted in the noir novels of Alessandro Robecchi, Gianni Biondillo, Francesco Recami and Piero Colaprico, good successors to Giorgio Scerbanenco, who wrote that ‘the Milanese kill on Saturdays’. These are just a few metaphors of an urban condition whose underlying characteristic is a controversial and harsh relationship with complexity, imbalances and a painful perception of human existence. aggravated by particular urban conditions.
The ‘rising city’, so beloved of certain rhetoric (of which Boccioni‘s genius was completely innocent), is also the city that, at certain junctures, reeks of hell.
It is worth bearing in mind this conceptual and poetic backdrop, particularly as the debate on cities is gaining traction in the media and political circles. The focus is on the most striking phenomena, such as security, the cost of living, widening social disparities and the difficult integration of immigrants. These are all serious and real issues that profoundly affect the sensibilities, fears and judgements of cives and voters, yet the underlying reasons between innovation and conservation that have always characterised the ‘city phenomenon’ are avoided.
Cities, particularly metropolitan areas, the ‘large cities’, are living, complex organisms that are subject to market pressures, as well as the challenges of urban planning and political leadership. They are the epitome of modernity: impetuous and innovative, and therefore in many ways anarchic and intolerant of plans and rules. Yet they are also sensitive archives of history, with ageing social classes who prefer the elegant, memory-filled form of the traditional urbs.
Milan, Greater Milan, the metropolitan city, the ‘infinite city’, is an excellent example of this. It is more attractive than other Italian cities because it is the only truly European city. It attracts people, intelligence, productive ideas, the cultural avant-garde, capital, businesses and innovations. The rest of Italy is, after all, a large province which often views Milan with suspicion and hostility, even if it is fascinated by it. Its population is growing, thanks in part to over 230,000 university students (making it the largest university city in Italy) and it is a favourite destination for the nouveau riche, who can enjoy favourable tax rates (200,000 euros a year and more) as well as an excellent quality of life with luxury shopping and exclusive clubs. Multinationals are flocking here (34% of all foreign companies in Italy are based in Milan) and real estate investors are pouring in, with billions of euros worth of investment.
But is this enough? Of course not. The fabric of a city isn’t made up of the highest-ranking figures, billionaires and the most creative ‘talent’ and ‘excellences’ (even the rhetoric of ‘talent’ and ‘excellences’ has done its damage, as has the obsession with locations and ‘exclusive’ events). However, it is sustained by a sizeable middle class comprising working individuals and families, growing couples, professors, artists, journalists, managers, labourers, tram drivers, shopkeepers and office workers. The middle classes. People.
All these social groups need homes and services. The urbs‘ structures and the civitas‘ civic values of integration are needed as cement, as well as good reformist politics.
In the 1950s, Italy experienced a significant social exodus, with millions of people moving from the impoverished south and the impoverished north-east towards cities undergoing major industrial development, beginning with the Milan-Turin-Genoa ‘triangle’. People also moved from impoverished, laborious rural areas to the cities in other parts of the country. This was an extraordinary and impetuous transformation for cities, communities and social contexts, and attempts were made to manage the phenomenon with ambitious projects. One example was the ‘Piano Casa’ (Housing Plan), launched in 1949 by Amintore Fanfani, who was then Minister of Labour. This plan aimed to build 350,000 new housing units by 1963, and was accompanied by the strengthening of the INA Casa (National Housing Institute) and a vigorous cooperative movement. The underlying idea was to build new social and middle-class housing estates. However, these projects were far from flawless and had their limitations and errors (there was also massive speculation in the building industry by ‘hands on the city’, which was often criminal and involved the mafia). Then there was the profoundly reformist land law, designed to promote orderly development free from speculators, which was signed by Christian Democrat minister Fiorentino Sullo in 1963. This law was at the root of the first major crisis of the centre-left government led by Aldo Moro, which had just been formed in October 1963. But cities continued to grow, and Italians became a nation of homeowners, seeking security.
However, this was not without its shadows and mistakes: Baggio and Quarto Oggiaro in Milan, Falchera in Turin, Corviale in Rome, CEP and Zen in Palermo, Librino in Catania and Le Vele in Scampia are names that have come to symbolise poor, sloppy and mediocre social urban planning. Roberto Guiducci has written lucid and insightful pages on this subject in several books and in the introductory pages of the Pirelli magazine.
Today, this issue is back in the news, and it is a European issue. All large cities are suffering greatly when it comes to affordable housing, especially for the younger generations, for young couples in London or Madrid, Paris, Frankfurt, Barcelona, Amsterdam or Milan who want to build a future where knowledge, innovation and relationships are concentrated, and where quality of life is high. ‘The European plan for 650,000 homes a year is starting’, writes Il Sole 24 Ore on 16 December, describing an EU Commission programme that aims to mobilise €153 billion every twelve months.
If Europe’s future in terms of security, technology, real sustainability and innovation is to be based on the ‘knowledge economy’, it is precisely the younger generations that we must look to, starting with providing them with affordable housing and services, integration and the development of job and career opportunities.
The same reasoning applies to Italy and Milan. Following a decision by Mayor Beppe Sala‘s council, the city is discussing a new housing plan to build 10,000 new homes per year for ten years, using public and private resources. The plan also encourages companies to consider housing as a welfare option for their employees. Assolombarda has made this a priority, and ATM is already well ahead in this regard in order to retain bus, tram and underground drivers in the city. In addition, 28,000 Aler homes (managed by the municipality and the region) need to be restored and renovated to make them available to low-income citizens.
It is worth repeating: Milan is not a ‘model’, but it is undergoing profound social change. While it is a market city, it cannot be left solely to the market. It needs effective urban and housing policies, and it must revive its traditions of productivity and social inclusion, both economic and social. Everything is connected: young people’s employment prospects, wages, opportunities for women to advance in their careers and decent pensions (Il Giorno, 21 December). The key issues are balanced development, social equity, and rebuilding confidence in a better future.
Ultimately, it is a question of democracy. Once again, we see the relationship between urbs and civitas. It is about housing policy, with quality construction and affordable purchase prices. It is an idea of Milan where citizens work, but also go to the theatre, listen to music, play sports, visit bookshops and consume and learn. Thanks to social policies, they can also think about having children, safe in the knowledge that they can rely on schools, hospitals and nurseries.
Vittorini was absolutely right when he wrote about the connection between beautiful cities and beautiful people. His son, full of enthusiasm, asks his father, who is lost in thought as he looks at a woman preparing the oven, ‘Was my mother beautiful?’ She certainly made good bread.
(Photo Getty Images)