TURIN. Two billion and six hundred million to be spent in five years. The first number indicates the very many resources that could make it possible to rewrite the future of Turin and its metropolitan area. The second, on the other hand, sets a strict time constraint for that expense. The biggest risk to avoid is that of pulling out of the drawers of the public administration all the projects that have been gradually put aside due to lack of resources or because they have become useless. But in this way we do not respect the indications of the EU, that is, rethink the future.
The strategic plan of the metropolitan city, which is now a year old, however, takes note of reality and engages elements of innovation. The capital thus becomes an “augmented Turin Metropolis”. The architect Matteo Robiglio is the coordinator of the Full Interdepartmental Research Center (Future Urban Legacy Lab) who wrote that plan and that a few days after the meeting of the control room on the use of funds from the Pnrr, composed of the Region-Municipality and University, has picked up the threads of that work that involved the territories, universities and polytechnic and the Links foundation.
For Robiglio «that plan is ready but it is open and can be integrated and enriched. But the real novelty is a vision of the future that acknowledges that Turin can no longer grow internally, while it has expanded and grown towards its still very industrial belt, towards its countryside, its hills and its mountains, becoming a single city innervated by a robust local railway network ». If this is the case, the funds of the NRP must be used to build the Grande Torino which includes the 312 municipalities that go from the plain to the Alpine ridge. It is the largest metropolitan area and «it is precisely the extension, the diversity of landscapes and the variety of dimensions of entities, communities and businesses that make it unique».
Turin cannot grow internally because it has fewer and fewer inhabitants and also because the pandemic has undermined the alternatives put in place in recent years to counter the contraction in manufacturing. The Turin of tourism, culture and university education is recovering with difficulty from the closures imposed by Covid. At the same time, however, the pandemic has led to a “mass digitization” that has changed not only the pace of work but also family habits, enhancing even marginal places and villages. The challenge, then, is “to celebrate the marriage between an ever smaller metropolis and the mountains”.
If this is the reality, then, “we must capitalize on the forced mass digitization that the pandemic has forced schools, services, businesses and families to intelligently reorganize services, production and training”. Teleworking, telemedicine and distance learning thus become opportunities to be seized to «reverse a centuries-old trend towards centralization in the capital». The target? “To increase the metropolis, that is, to incorporate, as in augmented reality, which we experience every day when we open our smartphone, the new technologies based on digital in physical, social and economic space”.
Thus, the plan outlines six axes – production, environment, mobility, training, equity, health – articulated in 24 strategies and 111 actions to get to “building on the plains, on the hills, in the mountains equal to opportunities to live, work, move , do business, learn, feel good “. But how to do it? «Thanks to a mixed infrastructure – continues Robiglio – which combines physical and digital accessibility, network technologies and autonomous technologies. The hubs of which could first of all be schools and stations, to be rethought as community platforms, at different scales, from the smallest municipality to the most central district “.
In this key, disused public spaces are recovered and put at the service of the community, a key role is played by the enhancement and possible expansion of the metropolitan railway system, perhaps connected to other forms of sustainable mobility. The way of dealing with the urban voids of large abandoned industrial areas also changes. “We imagine – explains Robiglio – to re-industrialize those near the transport hubs while those built in the middle of green areas should be re-naturalized to give space to new forms of digital and sustainable agriculture such as, for example, hydroponic cultivation” .
There is nothing to invent: “The necessary knowledge and technologies are those in which we already excel today – transport, mechatronics, automatic, energy, construction – which are to be put at the service of a new season of environmental and social innovation”. And the possible solutions have already been “implemented around the world, therefore, if there is the will they can be done”. –
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