Quartiere Sarto

Representative of Milanese architecture of the early 20th century, Quartiere Sarto was designed by the celebrated architect Giovani Broglio in Liberty style. This bourgeois piece of the city conceived as a self-containing block, consisted of 11 villas immersed in gardens and green spaces. While the idea of an isolated upper middle-class neighbourhood may have seemed an attractive one to many, the course of history turned things upside down. After years of abandonment of villas, a few years ago they were occupied by an activist driven community center called “Lambretta”. The villas open to socio-cultural activities as well as the homeless and needy, disrupted the very idea of a segregated high-end community. Reminding a city which was busy with expensive projects such as Expo, that the city’s sufferings aren’t only to be cured by a plastic-surgery like project such as the former. The battle of remaining in these villas became the battle for the “right to the city”, spurring a recurrent question: “for whom do we keep reinventing our cities?”
The violent evacuation and consequent selling of the block by its public owner (residential construction company of Lombardy aka ALER) to the private sector to refurbish this urban subject and prepare it for free market put an end to the yet another dream of a bottom up movement’s will to proactively shape our cities, giving voice and opportunity to the marginalised and disenfranchised.