Downzoning-Desealing (DD): is it practicable/practiced?
#climateAntiFragileTerritories
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Apr 15, 2025
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News and events promoted by CRAFT and our partners
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Our generative spaces of ideas, projects and collaboration
The Competence Centre works on the development of methodologies and design approaches that help public administrations to make the most of uncertainty, complexity, fragmentation and to build enabling conditions.
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A partner supporting public institutions and local actors in the development of innovative and effective projects for the transition toward antifragility.
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A space for debate and public discussion on territorial transformation processes, fragility and the means to activate antifragile resources.
Masters, education of excellence and MOOCs
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An open school offering courses to professionals, experts, freelancers and civil servants, PhD students and master students.
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A hub of national and international relations and strategic alliances aimed at building stable and qualified research networks and open and collaborative production of research.
Milano MetroHUB Centre
Politecnico di Milano and UnHabitat for metropolitan challenges
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Milano MetroHUB Centre on Metropolitan Dynamics
#climateAntiFragileTerritories #transitioningSpaces #enablingMarginalTerritories #emergingUrbanQuestions #designforAntiFragility
Milano MetroHUB Centre on Metropolitan Dynamics is an initiative of Politecnico di Milano and CRAFT (Competence Center Anti-fragilieTerritories) in collaboration with UN-Habitat, .
Milano MetroHUB Centre focuses on addressing the complex challenges of urbanisation and leveraging metropolitan areas' potential as engines of sustainable development and human prosperity. The collaboration seeks to develop innovative solutions through knowledge exchange, research, and collaboration.
Our mission
The Centre's mission is to focus on three main interconnected goals:
1) Metropolitan learning circle and high-level education and training: Design and deliver new tailored learning spaces and tools open to master students, civil servants, experts, policymakers
2) Science for/in metropolitan diplomacy: Contribute to making visible the new metropolitan dimension of the urban and its implications in the research and policy arenas involved in urban transitions while collaborating with international networks working on metropolitan subjects.
3) Metropolitan research and practice interface/ pilot projects: Promote and support innovative research projects inspired by critical theory and interested in addressing operative policy questions and problems by promoting design spaces generated at the intersection of academics, policymakers, and civil servants.
What we can offer:
• We provide specialised research, capacity building, and consultancy expertise for metropolitan cities and city-regions, focusing on trans-scalar processes, the role of urban design and planning, new built form types of metropolitan architecture, urbanity through collective landscapes rethinking urban borders.
• We offer a trans-disciplinary, design-oriented and place-based approach oriented to social impact.
• We share networks and relationships.
• We can provide low-cost or pro-bono input to local authorities across the world.
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In Focus
Insights and recommended readings
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Our pilot projects
#climateAntiFragileTerritories #transitioningSpaces #enablingMarginalTerritories #emergingUrbanQuestions #designforAntiFragility #antifragilyLAB
Anti-fragility Lab is CRAFT's incubator of ideas and a driving force of "projects" in the broadest sense practiced within DAStU, i.e. of strategies, visions and actions.
In March 2024, we closed our first call for ideas, aimed at promoting, consolidating and financing exploratory practices and design and research experiments characterized by:
• a notable methodological and process innovation
• the promotion of partnerships with territorial and institutional actors
• the development of products and tools capable of generating effective impacts (cultural, social, spatial, environmental) in the territories
• a contribution to the capacity of public administration to face the challenges related to transition, in conditions of crisis and uncertainty
The selected projects face specific challenges for the context of reference or area of intervention, but have in common the attention to the connected socio-spatial fragility dynamics. Among the admitted projects we find:
• National Biodiversity Future Center - Planning biodiverse and antifragile cities by Maria Chiara Pastore in collaboration with CNR and local authorities
• Italian atlas of deaths (and seriously injuried) on bicycles by Paolo Bozzuto (Coordinator), Fabio Manfredini, Emilio Guastamacchia
• The Sea of Lecce by Federico Zanfi and Francesco Curci in collaboration with the Municipality of Lecce
• School segregation by Marta Cordini (coordinator), Andrea Parma and Costanzo Ranci
• Spatial regeneration for the ecological and digital transition in the Alpine macroregion - A pilot project for Valtellina in the framework of the European EUSALP strategy by Andrea Arcidiacono and Stefano Di Vita
• ProdAction Production Places in Transition - The fragility of territories and ordinary spaces of production, logistics and work by Cristiana Mattioli (coordinator), Eugenio Morello
• Hybrid socio-cultural spaces in marginal mountain areas by Federica Maria Rossi (Project Coordinator), Ilaria Mariotti
The projects financed by the center:
• anchor themselves to the concept of anti-fragility and critically interpret its challenges
• contribute to the formation of knowledge, skills, tools, planning and research capabilities that the Center makes available to a wider audience made up of local and institutional actors
• contribute to the Teaching Excellence program, thanks to the development of knowledge, skills, approaches, and tools capable of producing high-quality training offered by DAStU
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Open School
Spaces for learning and experimentation
#designForAntiFragility
Beyond the edges! Milan-Mexico City’
The workshop “Beyond the edges! Milan–Mexico City” is a very good example of Craft’s approach to reimagining how knowledge is produced and shared—not only within academic walls, but especially in direct relation with territories and communities. That’s why we support learning experiences that move beyond the classroom, encouraging students, researchers, and professionals to immerse themselves in real contexts and co-design knowledge through action.
During the workshop a group of students from the School of Architecture of the Milan Polytechnic had the opportunity to leave the university and spending ten days (28 March–6 April 2025) in the life of the neighborhood, drawing and discussing project hypotheses.
The activities opened with a first day at Politecnico of Milan, where students had the occasion to attend a lecture by Rozana Montiel on the topic ‘Something from nothing. Act-interact-connect’ and getting to know different project designed by the architect in Mexico and after that, a full immersion in the context of Quarto Oggiaro, with a round table which involved a number of organizations active in the area and some inhabitants, to get a better knowledge and a first experience of interaction with the context.
From Sunday 29th the activities took place in Quarto Oggiaro, in the Santa Lucia Parrish.
In those days the students had the chance to:
· deal with a project in which they were involved from the very beginning, from the conception of the space (and its various changes during the weeks due to the continuous confrontation with the local community), to its practical and manual realization (dealing with unforeseen events, adjustments during the course of the project), to its communication, and finally, to its implementation and inauguration
· have a constant interaction with inhabitants of all ages, from children to elderly, both in structural moment (with children, adolescences, elderly) and some informal one (the doors of the construction site were always open).
· work in group between them but also with the local know-how: they interact with person of different ages that supported us helped us painting, working with wood, dismantling and reassembling the framework, and arranging the lights
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Ampère 20
Our multipurpose headquarters
CRAFT's headquarters are located in Milan, via Ampere 20. It is a complex multifunctional space where higher education training, applied research and outreach come together and integrate. A building part of the university campus but open on/to the city, fueling continuous and open interaction between the university and society.
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