Those neighbourhood are pedestrian nightmares, with no establishment at ground level, nothing to stop by, they are absolutely alienating to walk through.
What does "no establishment at ground level" mean? It is in the middle of Milan, it's full of establishments, there is also Piazza Gae Aulenti three steps away. (I have been there several times)
Well not really, except for the park I guess, still Bosco Verticale is not in the middle of the park.
If by "glass desert" you mean that it's full of buildings covered in glass, then I suggest you actually visit Milan, because here it's really the opposite.
Just really to show my point: https://ibb.co/xhnnjtM, no glass desert of course, the other side has the park
"Those neighbourhood are pedestrian nightmares," - cit
When you're just talking in reality about two residential buildings and they are nightmares because these two residential buildings have no establishments (and no I cannot recross the road).
which is exactly the point I was trying to make, this place is terrifying to walk alone i.e. at office hours. nobody around, nothing at ground level, nowhere to stop by, just few cars and you.
dude, I can hear you screaming that "the grapes are too sour", but come on... bosco verticale is gorgeous and I envy a lot who can afford to live there
look I just wanted to go for a walk and see the new milano, I got out sometimes in the morning at gioia and walked along the greenery, then turned toward piazza repubblica, and there was basically nothing open but the occasional bank and insurance office along the way. it's a terrible neighborhood for pedestrian.
"One of the cities leading the way in embracing sustainability and environmentally friendly urban design is Milan"
Milan is one of the most polluted cities of the western world (looking at the data[1]) and a literal death trap for cyclists and pedestrians. The numbers of car is out of control.
So... there is a long way to go to make it sustainable and environmentally friendly. Some token building for multi-millionaires doesn't really help, sorry.
Milan is not very different from any other EU city. It's just that the majority of the pollution stagnates due to the mountains surrounding the city preventing airflow. There was a famous individual who proposed to wipe out a mountain to solve this...as you can imagine that is a little too drastic.
Sound urban planning is extremely important. From the perspective of human history, urban planning is permanent. It is an extremely rigid medium. Nothing short of catastrophic destruction can hope to alter city plans once implemented.
The urban planning we have today, if we have anything we can even call urban planning, is often abysmal. Developers can basically build with no thought or care given to the long-term consequences of their actions (which, frankly, is what city planners should be concerned with, but alas).
One example: strip farmland, near or in cities, rezoned for development. Strip farmland is divided into narrow strips with unpaved country roads offering farm equipment access to the farmer's crop. This makes sense as narrow strips reduce the distance a farmer must travel down the country road to get to his plot. It also takes fewer turns of the farm equipment to harvest said crop.
The problem, however, is that developers then build for that narrow plot in isolation. That means a dead end street is paved off the (probably by now paved) country road. The process repeats as more farmers sell off their individual plots. The result is a comb configuration.
Why is this a problem? Well, because now you have all these little dead end streets that feed into one, long, skinny country road. Because of the lack of proper urban planning, residents are forced to drive to stores, work, schools, etc. because none of these were included by developers in these developments, leading to traffic congestion. And if they were included, it still sucks to navigate the terrain because the country road is the only traffic artery, and it risks turning into a so-called city "stroad" that is hostile to pedestrians.
You could mitigate this to some degree with some very modest regulation of land use. For example, the selective use of eminent domain to prevent building N meters from the narrow ends of the plot to allow for future street construction (to complete the comb into a grid) or non-residential buildings like stores, schools, and businesses.
Of course, developers can screw up large plots of land just as well, so at least the strip farm limits his reach. The point is that, whatever, the case, the city or town must not allow developers to _dictate_ urban planning.
Milan is plagued by choices unrelated to past urban planning, e.g. it is in an aeea where geography traditionally led to stagnating air (fog was a defining characteristic of Milan) and this has impacts on pollution.
But it's also really polluted because there are a bunch of really old heating systems. That would require almost zero planning, but it requires political will.
I've walked past these buildings and they look nice, but I was/am not so optimistic about the maintenance required when the buildings are 20, 30+ years old. From the article:
> Periodically, a group of mountaineering arborists lowers themselves from the roofs of the two towers to tend to the plants, checking their health, and pruning or replacing them as needed.
Are these mountaineering arborists volunteering for the fun of it? Paid by the building management? Residents? If volunteers, it sounds like a fun activity but quite unsustainable for more than a handful of buildings. If paid (now or in the future), I'm quite curious what the average cost is and what the contingencies are for a lapse in maintenance due to change of ownership, rising cost leading to longer maintenance interval, etc. Maintaining the greenery is one aspect, but so is maintaining the concrete holding it up.
Despite my lack of optimism I do find it interesting to explore. Sometimes a few... mildly bourgeois... early demonstrations do provide the inspiration and requisite practical experience to get things rolling.
This is the interesting surface of design/architectural meeting reality.
The landscaping project is sensational, but having vertical foliage as part of each level of housing I think is a short-term design ideal with medium-long term failure due to the reality of human interaction with their proximity. The extra work gives an initial hit of human pleasure, but it doesn't seem to play out as being worth it in terms of sustainability or emissions neutrality.
Bosco Verticale is among the most expensive building in Milan, in a very expensive area. Only affluent people live there, and beside the very expensive piece of real state, the building incurs in high costs of maintenance.
This is awesome. Living around nature is not just pretty, but healthy for us and good for our focus / productivity / mood / fitness / recovery / general well-being.
For a look into the benefits of living near green space (ie nature contact):
I've been there a few times & spoken to people who live there. It's beautiful but requires a LOT of maintenance. There are 20,000 bushes and 800 trees. Just maintaining the gardens costs $200,000 per month! There are 113 units, so maintenance itself comes to $1,800 per month per unit.
Ah, Isola. When I was living in Milan 30 years ago that is where you'd look for your bike/moped if they stole it. They did a good job there if you now consider it a luxury area.
I lived in Isola for a year around 2001 (piazza Minniti), and the direction of travel was already well-understood. Even the centro sociale squatters knew they were fighting a lost cause. I was back a couple of years ago and it's largely unrecognisable, with art galleries and real-estate agencies in place of cheap bakeries and northafrican takeaways. I got lost, and felt so depressed that I've never been back since.
I’m no expert and I don’t know the specifics of this vertical garden but trees and shrubs of that size usually have deep and wide root systems that give them incredible resilience. Without that root system and huge volumes of dirt to support it, the plants probably require a ton more monitoring by actual botanists instead of just landscapers.
I don’t think the problem is just the amount or cost of maintenance but how slow it is: the maintenance staff work on the outside of the building hanging from the top. Safety procedures alone would eat a lot into that work time.
If maintenance can be somehow written off the taxes, there is an incentive to overestimate its cost.
Since this thing is unique, there's no statistics, and the cost can be declared ridiculously high. (Also an additional display of conspicuous consumption.)
It is nice, but nobody except celebrities and super rich people can afford any of these apartments.
It’s easy to create nice things for extremely rich people, the real challenge in Milan is to provide aesthetically pleasing and environmentally sustainable buildings and neighbourhoods for the 99%.
It’s funny because (anecdotally based on visiting Milan once) I’ve come to use Milan as an example of a city made almost entirely of rock and stone, with virtually zero green anywhere to be seen.
Granted, I was there for one week, but it was markedly different from any other large European city I’ve been to. I hope they install a few trees at street level and along the canal as well!
Ma Milano è verde! ("But Milan is full of green!") is a bit of a meme over there. Because it's both true and false at the same time: yes, the city centre has precious few green spaces, lacking an equivalent to Central Park or Hyde Park; but more and more people now live on the outskirts, the hinterland, and actually those surrounding areas are pretty green still.
Practical considerations aside, it intuitively seems like making green covered skyscrapers like this can actually increase the primary productivity of a given ground area.
In a typical dense forest, plants at the top of the canopy are probably not efficiently using all of the light they absorb, and much is lost to branches. Given how many plants can thrive without any direct sunlight, just having sunlight for half the day from an angle (a plant on one of the balconies) is probably forcing more efficiency and growth out of the plant relative to the amount of light energy it receives.
I suppose if the ground was covered in skyscrapers of comparable height, the effect would be more or less neutralized by the shade from neighboring buildings.
43 comments
[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 135 ms ] threadIf by "glass desert" you mean that it's full of buildings covered in glass, then I suggest you actually visit Milan, because here it's really the opposite.
Just really to show my point: https://ibb.co/xhnnjtM, no glass desert of course, the other side has the park
And your defence for that neighborhood seems to be "hey look the other neighborhood on it's side is not that bad"
So, yaeah.
When you're just talking in reality about two residential buildings and they are nightmares because these two residential buildings have no establishments (and no I cannot recross the road).
Milan is one of the most polluted cities of the western world (looking at the data[1]) and a literal death trap for cyclists and pedestrians. The numbers of car is out of control.
So... there is a long way to go to make it sustainable and environmentally friendly. Some token building for multi-millionaires doesn't really help, sorry.
[1] https://www.eea.europa.eu/themes/air/urban-air-quality/europ...
You can auto translate this from Italian for the details https://www.vice.com/it/article/bj7dn8/il-folle-progetto-di-...
The urban planning we have today, if we have anything we can even call urban planning, is often abysmal. Developers can basically build with no thought or care given to the long-term consequences of their actions (which, frankly, is what city planners should be concerned with, but alas).
One example: strip farmland, near or in cities, rezoned for development. Strip farmland is divided into narrow strips with unpaved country roads offering farm equipment access to the farmer's crop. This makes sense as narrow strips reduce the distance a farmer must travel down the country road to get to his plot. It also takes fewer turns of the farm equipment to harvest said crop.
The problem, however, is that developers then build for that narrow plot in isolation. That means a dead end street is paved off the (probably by now paved) country road. The process repeats as more farmers sell off their individual plots. The result is a comb configuration.
Why is this a problem? Well, because now you have all these little dead end streets that feed into one, long, skinny country road. Because of the lack of proper urban planning, residents are forced to drive to stores, work, schools, etc. because none of these were included by developers in these developments, leading to traffic congestion. And if they were included, it still sucks to navigate the terrain because the country road is the only traffic artery, and it risks turning into a so-called city "stroad" that is hostile to pedestrians.
You could mitigate this to some degree with some very modest regulation of land use. For example, the selective use of eminent domain to prevent building N meters from the narrow ends of the plot to allow for future street construction (to complete the comb into a grid) or non-residential buildings like stores, schools, and businesses.
Of course, developers can screw up large plots of land just as well, so at least the strip farm limits his reach. The point is that, whatever, the case, the city or town must not allow developers to _dictate_ urban planning.
But it's also really polluted because there are a bunch of really old heating systems. That would require almost zero planning, but it requires political will.
> Periodically, a group of mountaineering arborists lowers themselves from the roofs of the two towers to tend to the plants, checking their health, and pruning or replacing them as needed.
Are these mountaineering arborists volunteering for the fun of it? Paid by the building management? Residents? If volunteers, it sounds like a fun activity but quite unsustainable for more than a handful of buildings. If paid (now or in the future), I'm quite curious what the average cost is and what the contingencies are for a lapse in maintenance due to change of ownership, rising cost leading to longer maintenance interval, etc. Maintaining the greenery is one aspect, but so is maintaining the concrete holding it up.
Despite my lack of optimism I do find it interesting to explore. Sometimes a few... mildly bourgeois... early demonstrations do provide the inspiration and requisite practical experience to get things rolling.
The landscaping project is sensational, but having vertical foliage as part of each level of housing I think is a short-term design ideal with medium-long term failure due to the reality of human interaction with their proximity. The extra work gives an initial hit of human pleasure, but it doesn't seem to play out as being worth it in terms of sustainability or emissions neutrality.
For a look into the benefits of living near green space (ie nature contact):
https://www.internationaljournalofwellbeing.org/index.php/ij...
Indoor plants also have salutary and performance effects.
It's a luxury building in a luxury area.
I lived in Isola for a year around 2001 (piazza Minniti), and the direction of travel was already well-understood. Even the centro sociale squatters knew they were fighting a lost cause. I was back a couple of years ago and it's largely unrecognisable, with art galleries and real-estate agencies in place of cheap bakeries and northafrican takeaways. I got lost, and felt so depressed that I've never been back since.
I don’t think the problem is just the amount or cost of maintenance but how slow it is: the maintenance staff work on the outside of the building hanging from the top. Safety procedures alone would eat a lot into that work time.
Since this thing is unique, there's no statistics, and the cost can be declared ridiculously high. (Also an additional display of conspicuous consumption.)
Granted, I was there for one week, but it was markedly different from any other large European city I’ve been to. I hope they install a few trees at street level and along the canal as well!
This is way more ignorant than it sounds.
Milan is full of parks, some incredibly vast (eg: parco lambro, bosco in città, parco trotter).
And a lot of roads are literally filled with trees (eg: via pacini and via lomellina).
Please grow up and stop relaying this ignorance.
In a typical dense forest, plants at the top of the canopy are probably not efficiently using all of the light they absorb, and much is lost to branches. Given how many plants can thrive without any direct sunlight, just having sunlight for half the day from an angle (a plant on one of the balconies) is probably forcing more efficiency and growth out of the plant relative to the amount of light energy it receives.
I suppose if the ground was covered in skyscrapers of comparable height, the effect would be more or less neutralized by the shade from neighboring buildings.