Abstract:

Urban Continuity rethinks Milan’s southern edge as a systemic, car-free park where city, memory, and everyday life coexist. The south marks a threshold between urban density and periphery - once shaped by gates, river ports, canals, and the Spanish Walls, now fragmented and dominated by traffic and isolated traces. The project responds to this condition, exploring how design can restore continuity while allowing history to remain active, layered, and experiential, employing a time-based approach - cyclos, chronos, and kairos - to structure moments and rhythms.

Research into Milan’s evolution reveals a city defined by water, fog, and porous ground - conditions still flowing underground but rarely surfacing. Demographic change, with an aging population, calls for spaces supporting slower rhythms, rest, and social visibility. Walkable sequences reconnect thresholds, former walls, and urban fragments, enabling intergenerational encounters and ephemeral rituals.

Water reemerges as infrastructure and atmosphere: drawn from canals and rainwater, it forms mist, reflective surfaces, and swimmable basins shifting with climate and daily life. Sensors and human movement trigger ambience variations, creating moments to pause, observe, play, and share space. Local stone mediates time, accepting erosion and patina, embedding traces of use. Rather than a finished form, the project is an evolving framework, allowing the city’s identity to unfold perpetually through everyday experience.