Shaping a City With(out) Canvassing Its Citizens. The Transformation of Parco Bassini in Milan: A Case Study

This contribution focuses on the urban conflict generated from the functional recovery of the former Parco Bassini, a small green area located northeast of Milan, after the city’s Polytechnic University radically changed its urban destination, in order to build the new University Chemistry Department in winter 2020. This sudden transformation provided a contrast between two fronts: on the one hand, there were the Institutions who had promoted it and, on the other, the citizens who were opposing it. The purpose of this research is to reconstruct the reasons why the initial impetus of the social movement in defence of the Parco Bassini has gradually faded. From a theoretical point of view, the study presented is based on the TPSN (Territory, Place, Scale, and Network) Framework, a multidimensional model developed also to investigate the different forms of contestation, resistance, mobilization, and bottom-up struggles. Thus, the concept of place has been favoured here as an epistemic principle from which to start the analysis: with its symbolic and relational features, it allows to identify the meaning and attachment to the spaces of everyday life. Additionally, to broaden the investigation perspective, inter and multi-scale relationships between the actors involved have been included to better understand their interactions and influence on the spatial processes. These different geographical lenses have also been adopted to examine the stages of the citizens’ protest from its initial fervour to its weakening and its end. In particular, the lens of the place has been chosen to observe the origin of the conflict, while the lenses of the scale and the network have been selected to understand the agency of all the players involved. The analysis has been conducted referring to bibliographic, documentary, and cartographic sources and using qualitative methodologies such as archived work and in-depth interviews. The preliminary results all point to the Parco Bassini case as an example of how a conflict linked to a closed space may involve supra-local dynamics. This study case is also significant for young geographers because of the growing relevance of urban space and its transformation processes, which often involve junior researchers and activists.