Our final destination on our trip north was Brescia – a city to the east of Milan under the foothills of the Italian Alps. A lesser known city in the Po Valley Region, Brescia sits quietly under the shadow of its other urban neighbors on the heavily-trafficked highway A4 (Turin, Milan, and Venice). These days, however, the city is repositioning itself as an Italian pioneer in urban development.
What is Brescia doing that is getting the attention of planners? It has to do with their efforts related to social housing. According to the European Urban Knowledge Network (EUKN – http://www.eukn.org/eukn/themes/Urban_Policy/Housing/brscia-housing-projects_1562.html), the City of Brescia is undertaking two housing projects that are aimed at improving access to housing for the migrant population. Brescia’s dedication to the expansion of social housing is much more ambitious than the average Italian city – many cities have experienced a decline of quality and quantity in their social housing as a result of the decentralization of national housing policy (the Gescal Tax of 1963, for example, was eliminated in the 1990s – it eliminated a public tax base for social housing funds).
Improving social housing isn’t the only ambitious undertaking in Brescia. Another issue deals with the overall image of the city – Brescia is continuing to make the historical center an attractive part of town, even while the population is declining. A common way for urban centers to attract visitors is to change the urban fabric, such as the massive Porta Nuova project in Milan. In Brescia, however, the historical center is MAINTAINED in order to ATTRACT new visitors. The museum of the city, Santa Giulia, acts as a way for the city to present itself in a certain desired manner (selective historical reference). Almost 50 million Euros and 30 years of activity have been put in to create the museum.
Will Brescia’s attempts make the city a mandatory destinations for tourists to Northern Italy? This, like many other questions, cannot be answered since the developments are all too recent to be effectively analyzed. The role of the planner, however, is to work as much as possible to make sure that the future ends up in the best way possible for the most amount of people.
Planners have learned a lot from this week-long field trip, and I hope that you have learned something more about the field of planning, too.