Milan grew without a direction. For years, the transformation of the city has been presented as a success, a model of modernity, innovation and opening to international capital.
But under the surface of urban marketing, a fragile, contradictory, opaque system has been consolidated. Today that system is collapsing. Eighty suspects, 150 blocked construction sites, 1,600 apartments, an economic damage estimated at hundreds of millions of euros. An investigation involving politicians, councilors, architects, developers, municipal technicians. But the point is not just judicial. It is urban, political, administrative.
According to what emerges from the investigations of the Milan prosecutor’s office as part of the investigation into urban planning, the problem would not only be attributable to corruption episodesbut to a wider structural crisis of the city’s development model. The investigators detect how Milan is hostage to a system that has gradually abandoned urban planning in favor of a case -by -case basis, often outside the local government plan and without shared criteria. According to the Prosecutor’s Office, it is an overall strategic vision, replaced by a logic of continuous negotiation between public and private. The crisis, for the architect and urban planner Lorenzo degli Esposti (among the most critical of the Sala junta in recent months in Milan, together with several other technicians and intellectuals), has precise roots.
«The ongoing development model was already born during the first council of Gabriele Albertini. It is there that we begin to talk about the development of urban policies, based on the “document of classification of municipal urban planning policies – reconstruct the great Milan” conceived in 2000 by Luigi Mazza – Urbanist Professor first in Turin, then in Milan – on behalf of the Municipality “. An official document that outlined axes of “T -TA” development axes, from Rogoredo to the Expo area and from the center to Sesto San Giovanni, passing through Bicocca and Falck. “This scheme, all in all logical, followed a Chiara director: via Emilia who becomes a Sempione, a natural territorial continuity” recalls the complaints. “The orthogonal axis was born from the need to manage development in the Bicocca-Falck area”. But that vision was never followed. “Instead of developing according to a coherent scheme, unnecessary interventions have multiplied, often kept outside the PGT”. The local government plan, the cardinal tool to regulate urban development, has been systematically circumvented.
«The most significant projects do not fall within it. The emblematic case are the railway stops »explains the architect. In 2017, the Municipality signs an agreement with the State Railways and a private fund. «The idea of regenerating the airports was right: reinstatement abandoned areas in the urban fabric is a necessity. But this happened out of the regulatory plan, through a program agreement. If it had gone to the city council, the scope of the problem would have emerged ». The price of that agreement? The abandonment of the second railway passerby, from Porta Genova to Villa Pizzone. «A strategic work to constitute a metropolitan circle line on iron. It had already been placed at the basis of the negotiation with FS by the commissioner Giorgio Goggi (Giunta Albertini): it was enough to keep it as a staple and make it “. The official justification was “reduced the building indexes to make the operation sustainable”. But for exposed “metropolitan mobility on iron has been compromised. It was a huge mistake. ” A choice that has weakened the city for the next 100 years. In return, a negotiated urban planning, devoid of transparency.
“With the slogan of the” green “, a choice was justified that has compiled the creation of an essential infrastructure. A negotiated and non -planned decision -making approach has been consolidated: it is discussed on a case -by -case basis, with individual actors, without a unitary vision ». In this context, the distinction between collective interest and private convenience has progressively lost. “Just put some social housing (Ers) and some tree to say that a project is” of collective interest “”. But collective interest, observes, is not a formula. It is a system responsibility. Not surprisingly, also according to the Milan prosecutor’s office, the 2017 program agreement on railway stopovers has produced effects distant from the public interest.
The magistrates recall the critical issues already highlighted by the Monti government, where the assignment of volumes built to private individuals was justified by the promise of public workslike the enhancement of the urban railway service. However, for the Prosecutor, the result was an imbalance: economic advantages disproportionate for private individuals, also made through virtual or questionable “renovations” demolitions, in the face of an environmental worsening, land consumption and loss of housing quality. The alleged public interest would thus be translated into concrete damage to the inhabitants and the community. It is a responsibility that has further crumbled with the growing role of the landscape commission. And the confirmation by Mayor Beppe Sala of President Giuseppe Marinoni, the creator of the so -called PGT Shadow, accused of corruption.
At the same time, when Giancarlo Tancredi is appointed councilor, there were already critical issues: Anac had raised reliefs for his previous managerial role. His appointment had been wanted as a room, forcing his hand a little. According to investigations, Tancredi is the pivot of an opaque system, where “the technical commissions become quick decision -making tools, outside a strategic frame”.
The Futura Torre case shows it: A project rejected by the Commission is re -presented by another study, that of Alessandro Scandurra, a member of the same commission, who receives a 321 thousand euro assignment. Moreover, if there is no reference framework, each project becomes evaluable only for its immediacy. The ability to clearly say what is right or wrong. The collapse of the system is not only institutional, but also economic.
For 13 years, the Municipality has not updated urbanization charges. It is said that they were not retouched to stimulate building development after the 2009 crisis and then of Covid. But it is legitimate to ask if it was not a deliberate choice, which has favored certain operations rather than others. Only in 2023 did the administration decided to adapt them, in a partial and late way. “If there is a problem related to urbanization charges, namely: if raising them involves a drop in attractiveness for investors, then this is a political issue. If this were the case, it is discussed openly, the existing opportunities are evaluated and the law is changed. Punto »specifies the complaints. Instead, it went on ignoring the norm. «At the Cheticella, they got there and had to adapt them. So the point is not that the norm was wrong -I don’t think it was, at least not in this case ».
The damage is enormous: only in 2024 the common estimated 165 million euros lost. By adding the previous and subsidized operations through improper renovations, the hole could touch a billion. As in the case of the Lc residences, where the Prosecutor’s Office ascertained a “discount” of 618,698 euros. The Court of Auditors in 2024 had already denounced 300 thousand euros for the Park Towers. Today the system is collapsing. And also around the new Stadium of San Siro, the Guardia di Finanza spoke of a corrupt agreement to circumvent environmental constraints.
Another little aspect of little discussed, but central in the Milanese urban chaos, is the regulatory drift that has transformed rules and technical tools into negotiable devices. This fragility has made it possible to expansion uncoordinated building, which in many cases was based on growth projections denied by real data.
No updated settlement load plan, no serious impact assessment on traffic, services, infrastructures. A void aggravated by the absence of structured transparency: the data on building flows, on the charges actually collected, on public compensations and environmental benefits are often not very accessible, disorganic, fragmented. In this context, the city council has been progressively exhausted: the debate on large interventions moved out of the institutional offices, to a circuit made of technical tables, law firms and personal relationships. Citizens were systematically excluded from decision -making processes, even in the presence of transformations that impact whole neighborhoods.
Just think of the debate on San Siro, conducted first as a “public confrontation”, then translated into armored operational choices. Or to the Porta Romano Scalo projectwhere the transformation of the area to host the Olympic village has passed without a real discussion on the long -term effects. To this is added a serious confusion between planning levels. In this context, the figure of the councilor for urban planning has turned from a political guide to a dossier manager. The Tancredi case is the most extreme, but not isolated: for years the department has been gradually integrated with the technical office, without distinction between address and management. Political power has left room for a concentrated and not very transparent technical direction. In other words: the government of urban transformation has been lost. And without government, control over the economic, social and environmental effects of development has also been lost.
Today the city pays all this with a blocked, weakened system, without credibility in the eyes of citizens and institutions. To start again, it will serve more than a new PGT: it will be necessary to rewrite the relationship between rule and decision, between political address and technical evaluation, between the city and those who live there.
