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Monza: the challenge to give new life to the abandoned areas

02 April, Re Quadro

According to the Monza and Brianza local newspapers, the Municipality is looking with interest at abandoned areas.

The industrial past of Monza, whose manufacturing vocation has turned to services and innovation, has left a legacy of old industrial buildings that mingle with the local real estate made of prime residential suburbs.

The Administration is intending to speed up the requalification and urban regeneration processes in order to save these areas from decline, with considerable aesthetic and safety issues. In fact, many of these old industrial buildings are located in the city centre, such as the former textile factory Pastori e Casanova.

The impressive 24,000 Sq m building is located in the central and prestigious neighbourhood of San Biagio. The complex is composed of several parts of an old industrial plant dated 1880 and an old office building that was the first to undergo the requalification. The building accommodated the representative office of the Province of Monza-Brianza, then the Lyceum Mosè Bianchi since 2016.

The owners want to preserve some parts of the old plant and demolish others that are currently in precarious conditions and that don’t represent any added value to the requalification. The property is located behind one of the most famous buildings of the city, Cappella Espiatoria, to remember the assassination of Umberto I by the anarchist Gaetano Bresci.

The project had been already presented to the previous administration, and it includes the creation of residences in one of the most exclusive parts of Monza, as well as the requalification of the Nervi pavilion. According to the original project by the architect Gae Aulenti (1927-2012), the facility is meant to accommodate the city gallery, as well as conference rooms and commercial spaces such as a bookshop and a cafeteria. Moreover, the project implies also the implementation of a public parking space in an area where it’s very much needed.

The project is included in a group of requalification operations of former industrial plants that will be turned also into in cultural spaces. This may serve well a city which has a special attention to artistic phenomena and expositions, even though with some understatement.

In addition, the property is a few metres away from the complex Villa Reale, recently renovated and currently hosting a beautiful Van Dyck painting borrowed from the Capodimonte museum.

It’s certainly obvious that the administration is available to support requalification processes throughout the city, but it will take a significant marketing action to involve the local stakeholders, public as well as private, in order to ride the wave of the economic return that culture generates.

Source: Re Quadro

Translator: Cristina Ambrosi