Milano
In the skyscrapers that symbolize the pre-Covid production frenzy, tenants are changing their skin. Offices, impoverished by housework shifts, are looking for a way to get back to life. In the Porta Nuova district, for example, where the names of the big banks stand out, Unicredit, which has its iconic headquarters in Piazza Gae Aulenti, is about to sublet one of the two Towers, the B: 100 meters high for 21 floors of 800 square meters each where 1,500 employees worked. It is therefore a hunt for one or more tenants, an operation that, the bank explains, “will make hybrid work more sustainable, improving the environmental impact and reducing the costs of some of our offices where physical presence levels have been reduced. “.
Not far away, Bnp Paribas is also heading in the same direction, looking for new tenants for at least four of the 27 floors of its large headquarters, the Diamond Tower. But if this type of buildings, however located in the center of the city, manage to become functional again, the real problem is the high-rises in the hinterland or in the suburbs. Built as office districts, today they look like this: small ghost towns, from which practically everyone has fled and where the few commercial services that were there have lowered the shutters.
“There are thousands and thousands of empty square meters”, explains Emanuele Barbera, president of the Sarpi Immobiliare group who has developed a research on this issue: “The question to ask now is how to revitalize these areas, completing them with new services, from the gym. to kindergartens, to make them attractive again “. Of course, with the end of the state of emergency many offices are repopulating, but that long theorized “will no longer be the same” is now a tangible reality: the Allianz Tower, in the glittering City Life district, has about 66 percent of employees in smart working, while Generali, which is based in the skyscraper next door, welcomes employees back two days a week.
Roma
On the facade of the horizontal skyscraper where the BNL is based, in via Tiburtina, a play of lights takes shape, made up of solids and voids. The same ones that also alternate inside, between one workstation and another of the employees. There are 3,300 in all, but smart working and the sale of company branches have transformed the redevelopment project of a strategic area into a big question mark. About 500 people have been sold to the limited liability companies of two companies, as many will enter after leaving the other headquarters of the BNL in via degli Aldobrandeschi, in East Rome. Revolving doors.
Attendance at Tiburtina, the CGIL explains, will in any case be 40 percent less due to smart working. But, looking at what is happening to the banking sector as a whole, explains the secretary of First CISL Rome and Rieti, Claudio Stroppa“to cause the emptying of the main offices is on the one hand the displacement of the general directorates from the capital to the north, on the other the outsourcing of some services, with a reduction in staff and a gradual abandonment of places”.
Where there are large offices and neighborhoods have always been populated with the comings and goings of employees who have lunch at the bar, smart working risks leaving the desert: it has happened in the last two years in Via Nazionale, in the heart of Rome, where the closed shops are no longer counted. With the end of the state of emergency and the return to the office, now workers continue to work from home on average 10 days a month, even if the phenomenon, in the capital, is very jagged. days there was a return to the pre-Covid situation (“hasty and without any reorganization of spaces”, according to the union), at Enel which has its headquarters in Viale Regina Margherita empty for renovation.
Naples
The heaviest bill for smart working is paid by the Directional Center (Cdn) located on the border with Poggioreale. The citadel of 4.5 million cubic meters of offices has emptied with the pandemic: a further blow to a place that has never really taken off, already marked before Covid by the disposal of important offices such as the two Enel towers or the TIM buildings. The word “fittasi” on a skyscraper on island C is now faded. And, without employees, shops, bars and restaurants are doing badly: “From 2020 – says the owner of” Mimì Gi “- the drop is 80 percent”. One of the multinationals at the CDN has dropped from 2,200 to 350 employees at headquarters. A company not far away, on the other hand, has cleared three of the four floors and put them on rent.
Agile work also affects the offices of banks and medium-large companies in the other areas of Naples: professionals who take refuge in co-working and run away from the center due to the high rents and the lack of parking and public transport. An insurance broker has moved the headquarters to Brin 69, the former industrial warehouse redeveloped years ago into large and small offices with green areas and 500 parking spaces near the station and the motorway. “I hired the secretary in the eighth month of pregnancy, who by choice and efficiently works from home – explains the professional – So, I gave her room to an insurance expert, strengthening synergies in the office. Without smart working, no it would have been possible “.