What Infrastructures Leave Behind Mapping and Rethinking Marginal Spaces Across Doctoral Research and Design Studio Teaching

Abstract

This contribution explores the dimension of infrastructural borders within contemporary city and periurban landscapes, originating from the crossover between two Doctoral research projects framed under the Italian PNRR[1] PhD Scholarship 2022, and co-funded by FNM Group – the main integrated Group for sustainable mobility in the Lombardy region, in northern Italy. The specific Milanese context constitutes both the starting point of reflection and the conclusive testing ground to identify possible design strategies and verify design-driven approaches. Across the university-academic domain of Politecnico di Milano, and private mobility companies (FerrovieNord and Milano Serravalle-Milano Tangenziali), the two researches focus on both the railway and the highway networks, trying to highlight which role an architectural approach can play nowadays in the highly engineered realm of the infrastructure.

[1] PNRR, also known as National Resilience and Recovery Plan, is the Italian National declination of the Next Generation EU fundings aimed at relaunching European countries after the COVID-19 pandemic.

Keywords: infrastructure edges, leftover spaces, urban regeneration