Altre Lombardie is born: spotlighting peripheral territories
Altre Lombardie, Analysis and strategic scenarios for Lombardy’s inner areas, is born. The most comprehensive and far-reaching narrative of peripheral territories in an Italian regional context, which took into consideration 14 inner areas in Lombardy, with a wide range of landscapes: from the Alps to lakes and the Po Valley.
The material is the result of a process that saw the involvement of local communities and the organisation of 28 workshops, with around 1,600 participants, including hundreds of town mayors, and 9 seminars to publicly present the relevant issues emerging from the local studies. Each “territorial portrait” of the 14 inner areas contains over 50 online graphs and maps.
The field research was coordinated by Prof. Alessandro Coppola and originated from an agreement signed in 2021 by the Department of Architecture and Urban Studies (DAStU) at Politecnico di Milano and the General Directorate for Local Authorities, Mountains, Energy Resources and Water Resources of the Lombardy Region. The aim of this partnership is to help regional offices and local players define integrated area-specific strategies for the inner areas of Lombardy.
The DAStU team worked for two years to prepare a highly multidisciplinary overview of the challenges faced by many territories in the Po Valley, pre-Alpine valleys and Alpine valleys of Lombardy. Demographic challenges, of course, but also challenges linked to the supply of housing, mobility, services and adaptation to climate change. The result is an overview of needs, but also of potential, that entail the need for truly integrated and supra-municipal policies and a major investment in the capacity of the institutions of these territories - municipalities, unions of municipalities, mountain communities but also associations and cooperatives - without which those policies cannot be developed.
Alessandro Coppola, Department of Architecture and Urban Studies
Regional planning allocates around 14 million euros to each of these areas for the development of area-specific strategies that include projects for the development of services for the population, social inclusion, environmental action and economic growth. 6 of these areas also fall within the National Strategy for Inner Areas (SNAI) and receive government funding. The strategies and projects eligible for funding are now being defined by the lead institutions - Mountain Communities, Consortia - and the Lombardy Regional Authorities.
See the material available on the website www.altrelombardie.polimi.it/