INSPIRING CITIES

INSPIRING CITIES

The story of Coima is that of an urban vision developed on the neighborhood scale. It began in Zingonia, moved toward the Milanese hinterland, and then became established in the city itself, in the neighborhoods of Porta Nuova, Porta Romana, Farini Valtellina, and the Falck area in Sesto San Giovanni. From here the journey toward Rome is starting.

ACT ONE: ZINGONIA

A large billboard used to grab the imagination of motorists driving along the Milan-Venice motorway near Bergamo, forcing them to slow down. A man pointing downward with his finger drew attention to a caption that read “Qui nasce Zingonia, la nuova città” (“The new town of Zingonia was born here”). It was around the middle of the 1960s, when the word “future” was fueling the dream of the “Italian miracle” and Milan could claim to be the powerhouse of the nation’s economic development.

In 1963, the year in which Atalanta won the Coppa Italia, the Roman entrepreneur Renzo Zingone—the president and owner of the Banca Generale di Credito—announced that he wanted to build a town on around 500 hectares of land spread across the municipalities of Osio Sotto, Boltiere, Verdello, Verdellino, and Ciserano. The land was purchased on favorable terms by taking advantage of tax breaks offered for what were then classified as “depressed areas.”

The investment of a large amount of private capital in an undertaking that for Italians in the immediate postwar period would have inevitably recalled the enthusiasm surrounding the towns founded in the twenty-year period of Fascist rule seemed, on the whole, to be a risk worth taking. It was a demonstration of the vitality of the family capitalism that made up the DNA of the Italian business community, the strength (and sometimes the limitation) of the many small and medium businesses that had set Italy’s economy racing.

Renzo Zingone had an adventurous past, including the construction of public infrastructure in Venezuela, where he also had profitable gold and copper mines. He was also said to have been instilled with a family mission by his father Gennaro, who urged his children to “continually enhance our name.”

He was certainly a “creative” entrepreneur, in the sense discussed by Domenico De Masi in his historic research into innovation linked to figures distinguished by a powerful impulse toward group interaction. The decision to name the town after the family name is emblematic not just of his ambitions but also—perhaps above all—of a desire to do good by pursuing a long-term vision that closely resembled a utopia.

The Zingonia project envisaged a town with fifty thousand inhabitants and an integrated urban plan, including the construction of homes, industrial and logistics units, schools, fountains, and even monuments. There was to be a rational street layout, a hospital, shopping centers, a cinema, public and leisure spaces, and even a heliport.

Nothing was left to chance, and on the back of a previous, small-scale project at Trezzano sul Naviglio (the “Zingone neighborhood,” built on a previously marshy area of land), the project also received invaluable support from the architect Franco Negri (who not long since had graduated from Politecnico di Milano). He produced numerous studies informed by the tradition of modernist rationalism (and obviously the exciting case study of the fledgling city of Brasilia), plus analyses and sketches. These were all gathered together in 1965 in a publication by ZIF (Zingone Iniziative Fondiarie). In short, the project was for a ville radieuse of the Po Valley, which was in no way comparable to the one for the Milano San Felice neighborhood straddling the municipalities of Segrate and Novegro, launched in 1966, or the subsequent neighborhood of Milano Due, an Edilnord initiative which marked the economic take-off of Silvio Berlusconi.