MIPIM Awards 2018: Milan Porta Nuova awarded for the Best Urban Regeneration Project category

The Porta Nuova urban redevelopment project in Milan won the MIPIM Awards 2018 for the Best Urban Regeneration Project category. This award goes to a group of designers including the LAND studio, that oversaw the landscaping project.


A prestigious award celebrates a great teamwork: the Porta Nuova project in Milan, one of the most important urban transformations at European level, whose open spaces were designed by landscape architecture studio LAND, won the famous MIPIM Awards for the Best Urban Regeneration category. Created in 1991, the MIPIM Awards is one of the most important internationally-renowned competitions in the field of real estate.
The landscape designed by LAND for Porta Nuova aims at reaching greater urban permeability through greater density, mediating between the scale of the city and the scale of people. “LAND continues working on the open spaces of Milan. We want to increasingly focus our design project on them to create green infrastructures that will become social infrastructures”, said Andreas Kipar, landscape architect and founder of the LAND studio. 
The Porta Nuova intervention started in the year 2000 and is composed of the Porta Nuova Garibaldi, Porta Nuova Varesine and Porta Nuova Isola projects. It redeveloped 290,000 square metres of brownfield land in the centre of Milan, resulting from changes in the railway network. This ambitious transformation project was carried out by an exceptional team of professionals (over 20 studies from 8 different countries). The LAND studio carried out the landscape design, a primary theme for this work, creating the longest promenade of the city and operating on an area of 16 hectares of open spaces, representing more than half of the entire intervention area.
The pedestrian areas were increased by 65%, while the green areas were increased by 40%; finally, the cycling paths were increased by 70% in the entire neighbourhood. This project turned out to be extremely important as regards urban development and social aspects: indeed, as it regenerated a degraded area of the city by creating a positive relationship between the industrial history of the neighbourhood and its future perspectives, it also notably improved the urban quality of these areas.
With the victory of Porta Nuova in the Best Urban Regeneration Project category, the MIPIM Awards 2018 awarded a project that was realised to provide the community with actual advantages, in which the design of the open spaces played a key role in the transformation of the involved neighbourhoods.

Christiane Bürklein

Landscape design: LAND Italia Srl + Edaw 
Principal Designer: Andreas Kipar
Project manager: Gianluca Lugli (2005-2009) Valeria Pagliaro (2009-oggi)
Construction manager: Giuliano Garello
With: Giovanni Sala / Mauro Panigo / Sonia Mastropietro / Luisa Bellini / Valerio Bozzoli
Team: Ugo Perillo / Adriana Pinate / Marie Moltrasio / Cecilia Pirani / Ivan Maestri / Simone Marelli / Nicola Canepa / Maria Vigevani / Alice Brunello /  Josè Acosta / Elisa Frappi / Anna Brambilla / Roberta Filippini
Location: Milan, Italy
Year: 2005-2014
Photo credits: LAND Italia srl