Milan regenerates us until we’re drained, or the city that gave us a language to criticize it — and a job to stop doing so.

When I moved to Milan seven years ago, I came from a financially stable background, raised in the Emilia-Romagna of “everything works” and rights taken for granted.
But my idea of freedom was elsewhere.
Milan was the city where you could be many things at once, where words moved faster than trains, where you didn’t need permission to have an idea.
That’s where I wanted to test myself, challenge myself, learn how to build.
I’ve always believed that cities are the most explicit terrain for political and social contradictions, and I’ve always fought to read them, transform them, cross them without being crushed by them.

Over these years, I’ve worked, written, studied Milan from the inside.
I’ve dealt with sustainability, accessibility, urban justice. I’ve taken part in projects, competitions, international calls, searching for solutions in a city that seemed increasingly out of breath.
But what was supposed to be an intellectual and political challenge has slowly turned into hand-to-hand combat with a city that regenerates everything — except itself.

The word “regeneration” is everywhere.
On magazine covers, in press releases, in posters announcing new squares, new parks, new districts.
And yet, in many cases, regeneration doesn’t mean healing: it means selling, packaging, replacing.
Entire neighborhoods are rewritten in the name of innovation, while those who actually lived there are pushed out, marginalized, forgotten.
There is greenery, but it photographs better than it lives.
There is safety, but only for those who can afford to buy it.

Milan isn’t rotten because it’s illegal.
Milan is rotten because all of this is legal.

Those who work in architecture, urban planning, cultural communication — we know it well.
We know that many of the projects we take part in are just pieces in a larger machine, hard to name yet painfully evident.
You don’t get to save yourself by saying “I do my part well”: this city demands complicity, even when you try to resist it.
The paradox is that Milan gives you the language to critique it, and then hires you so you’ll stop doing it.
It asks you for vision, but only within boundaries.
It asks you for care, but only if it helps sell a product.
It asks you for ideas, but not for questions.

And so many of us — professionals, activists, researchers — find ourselves stuck in a subtle trap.
We work for the very city we wish were different.
We fool ourselves into thinking we can change it from within, but every day we realize the rules of the game have already been written.
Every word we use — sustainability, inclusion, accessibility — risks becoming a blunted formula.
Not for lack of faith, but for lack of real space.

Sometimes I think Milan is a foreign language I’ve learned too well.
I know how to speak it, how to decode it, how to take it apart.
But sometimes I just want to unlearn it, forget its logic, its race, its hunger.
I want a city that doesn’t ask me to earn every square meter, every hour of sleep, every breath.
A city that regenerates not spaces, but relationships.
A city that doesn’t need saving in order to truly exist.