Drosscape as a potential temporary reactivation tool in the area of Porta Romana District, Milan

Italy and in particularly, the capital city of Lombardy Region, Milan have been a scene for mass industrial and infrastructural systems in the 20th century. The past and recent production activities and their distribution efforts have been generating huge numbers of industrial plants and big scale infrastructure systems. Today, the city dramatically has been confronted with a challenge of managing wasted and abandoned spaces originated from this massive industrialization process. According to the Province of Milan, a survey carried out in 1988 by Centro Studi PIM indicated that there were 441 ha wasted industrial spaces in Milan urban region. These leftovers of the city are identified as drosscape areas in which there is a huge potentiality to be reactivated within the urban fabric. Whilst, significance of reprogramming these wasted areas is well-documented in the literature, in practice there are scarce examples of the drosscape areas that reactivated and reprogrammed in a sustainable way. In parallel, the potentialities turned into practice have not been prioritized for public use and environmental quality so it is clear that these wasted spaces have received little attention and neglected as a left-over until recently. Being one of the main interstitial landscape remain, the area of Porta Romana and its surrounding has been identified as an abandoned space with an increased insecure places around it and low environmental quality that have been blocking pedestrian circulation, accessibility and permeability of the southern part of the Milan. In this context, the aim of this research is to generate temporary design solution in the Porta Romana and its surrounding area as sustainable landscape and urban design oriented proposals to rediscover the potentialities of drosscape also by presenting future research hypothesis. This study adopts qualitative methodology, and employs documentary research and data collection tools as mapping. Academic literature drew on analysis of the maps and similar examples representing the same situation facing with similar problems and potentialities of drosscapes.