Abstract
This chapter deals with the structural shift in the economic base of the city of Milan and its metropolitan area, characterized by a great tradition of manufacturing and industrial districts, towards knowledge-based services directed mainly at the financial sector. This case study shows that, though the post-industrial transition of the city had not a significant impact on the employment structure, from the point of view of professionalization, it has exacerbated inequalities in income distribution and has caused the formation of new social and territorial polarization as a consequence of the fierce competition for space between the population and economic activities. Analysis of the locational behaviour of the knowledge-creating services provides evidence of the disruptive results—such as the under-capitalization of the urban area, the worsening of housing problems, the strengthening of the monocentric urban structure and the intensification of territorial imbalances—of neo-liberal policies and a service economy substantially left to market forces, in a territorial context with dense functional interrelations and faced with intense urban sprawl, the growth of traffic flows, as well as increasing housing costs, especially in the urban core.
This chapter is a development of ideas set out in the earlier essay “La transizione dell’economia urbana verso i servizi avanzati: il profilo di Milano”, Dialoghi Internazionali. Città nel mondo, 17, 2012: 118–141. Regarding the database used for the case study of Milan, special thanks are due to Paolo Casati of Studiolabo and to Lidia Mezza and Maria Elisabetta Romagnoni of the Studies and Strategic Support Service of the Milan Chamber of Commerce. The data processing and geo-referencing as well as their rendering into map format were performed by Andrea Mancuso.
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Notes
- 1.
The term “economic heritage”, proposed by Giulio Sapelli (2011) in a hermeneutic sense, has many affinities with the expression of urban knowledge capital. As well as stocks of fixed capital and the organic composition of capital in its various forms, this heritage consists of intangible assets, principally cognitive ones, and a complex of intangible values represented by the capital of institutional and social relations, the accumulation of which is fostered by the spatial collocation.
- 2.
I. Helbrech, The Creative Metropolis. Services Symbols and Spaces, Paper presented to mark the anniversary of the Gesellschaft fĂĽr Kanada-Studien, Grainau (Germany), February 1998.
- 3.
The local authorities are responsible for promoting mechanisms of strategic governance to mobilize the many local actors and their resources in the economic development and redevelopment of the urban space, and also for defining appropriate measures to mitigate the (economically and socially) destructuring effects of the development of the knowledge economy and the integration of the city into the global economic networks (Le Galés, 2003; Scott, 2010).
- 4.
The metropolitan area is generally accepted as coinciding with the Province of Milan, as it was configured prior to the institution of the Province of Monza-Brianza. It is here regarded as the two provinces taken together.
- 5.
The external acquisition of factors of production (materials, energy, components, processing by third parties, services, consultancy and knowledge), measured in terms of the relationship between added value and turnover, on the part of small enterprises in various sectors of industry increased from 69.3 % in 1990 to 80.4 % in 2008, according to data supplied by Unioncamere and Mediobanca, based on the turnover of a sample of companies (see F. Coltorti, “Tra il piccolo e il grande. Ruolo delle imprese di dimensione intermedia in Italia e in Europa”, report submitted to the Union Chambers of Commerce and the Industrial union of Turin, 24 October 2011, Mediobanca, Milan).
- 6.
Among the various industrial districts of the Milan urban region, three have specially benefited from their territorial proximity to Milan: Brianza, East Milan and Lecchese. The first one is the oldest and more competitive Italian furniture district and has developed several synergies between furniture, mechanical and textile industries. The second is a relatively young district specialised in the production of electric, electronic and medical equipment and it developed mainly thanks to FDI and the location choice of two giants in ICT (IBM and ST Microelectronics). The third has long-standing expertise in the metal-engineering industry.
- 7.
The data reported in this study have been combined with Asia data for 2008.
- 8.
Source: Statistical Register of Active Enterprises, Asia 2008.
- 9.
The data used are those of InfoCamere relating to the Register of Active Enterprises owned by the Chambers of Commerce and Industry of Milan and Monza-Brianza. On the whole, in 2011, the manufacturing firms are about 40,000, while firms classified as KCS are more than 37,000.
- 10.
These are mainly small-scale enterprises with a distinctive family-style management model and little relationship with structures supporting innovative processes.
- 11.
Assindustria Monza e Brianza-Nomisma, Brianza globale. I percorsi dello sviluppo, Research report, Monza 2000.
- 12.
Within the manufacturing sector, high-tech industries have been selected and considered separately, in accordance with the classification in common use.
- 13.
The high-tech district includes the “Green & High-Tech” technological centre.
- 14.
The classification adopted is that formulated by the SET Research Unit of IUAV University, Venice (cf. Compagnucci & Cusinato, 2011). For the database, we drew on various sources: the Milan Chamber of Commerce Companies Register (industries operating in 2011 classified by sector of activity on the basis of their main declared activity), the Yellow Pages, the Camera della Moda, Studiolabo, and universities’ websites.
- 15.
Over 40Â % of total mobility in Milan consists in movements in and out of the city, with around half of these journeys to and from the 39 municipalities of the first and second belts. Every day, some 850,000 people travel into Milan to work, study, access primary services and go shopping. For similar reasons, every day almost 270,000 residents travel out of the city. All told, the territory of the municipality of Milan has to cope with almost 5.3 million daily journeys (Comune di Milano-Agenzia MobilitĂ Ambiente Territorio, 2013).
- 16.
R. Cucca, “Unequal development. Economic specialization and social inequalities in six European Cities”, Paper presented at the 23rd ENHR-European Network for Housing Research Conference, 5–8 July, Toulouse 2011.
- 17.
The identification of the most disadvantaged social aggregates was performed considering three main forms of disadvantage, i.e. low education, unemployment and housing for rent.
- 18.
Begun on the basis of a Programme Agreement in the mid-1990s with a view to redevelopment, the transformation of the historic area of the Trade Fair has since been managed by the owners of the area (Ente Fiera) through a newly set up engineering and contracting company, created to manage the process of transforming Milan’s trade-fair system and operating on behalf of the big investors who had founded Citylife S.p.A.
- 19.
According to a study conducted on the Integrated Intervention Programmes, the public benefit achieved through the main urban transformation stood on 8Â % of the value generated by these (Camagni, 2008).
- 20.
As regards the extension of housing risk, the public institutions have played a marginal role. However, traditional social institutions and private-sector social agencies (above all social solidarity organizations—Onlus—and various Foundations) have to some extent compensated for their inadequacy.
- 21.
To demonstrate the role played by the real-estate sector, overall investment in works of urban transformation and housing from the late 1990s to 2005 is estimated to have been worth more than 10 billion euros, 87Â % of it in the construction sector and the remaining 13Â % in business services. In 2006, according to municipal data, more than 8Â % of urban territory (more than 13 million square metres) was undergoing redevelopment, with 80Â % of this area allocated to complex programmes, mainly on extensive sites (Memo, 2007).
- 22.
Seventy-eight percent of the area of Garibaldi-Repubblica is in public ownership (Municipality of Milan and Italian State Railways), with the remainder divided among several owners.
- 23.
The operation as it was carried out (the new “business district” occupying an area of 290,000 square metres, with more than 3,120,000 square metres of useable floor space), extended to connect three projects, has suffered many changes. The effect has been to reduce the institutional pole, increase the residential accommodation (luxury apartments), seriously marginalize the quota of subsidized housing (a mere 5 % of the total residential space) and raise the profile of a number of global players. The development, consisting of a series of oversized buildings (very similar to those proposed by the Citylife project), which will house the headquarters of large financial institutions and insurance companies, has thus done no more than repeat the by now outdated “business centre”, with the addition of shops, hotels and residential accommodation.
- 24.
Writing of the semantic and symbolic expansion of districts or clusters of creative industries, and the large investments made by a growing number of cities in promoting them, Graeme Evans (2009)— in an internationally broad comparative analysis of urban-planning policies intended to create “spaces of invention”—refers to the case of Milan and its “Fashion City” to point out that some of these developments “are highly speculative and dependent upon major property investment” and may never materialise.
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Mazzoleni, C. (2016). Knowledge-Creating Activities in Contemporary Metropolitan Areas, Spatial Rationales and Urban Policies: Evidence from the Case Study of Milan. In: Cusinato, A., Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, A. (eds) Knowledge-creating Milieus in Europe. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-45173-7_11
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