The Darsena di Milano (Italy): ‘Restoration’ of an Urban Artificial Aquatic Environment Between Citizens’ Hopes and Municipal Projects

Over the last 20–30 years, an impressive number of European cities have undertaken projects on the waterfront spaces to meet the needs of what is called the ‘leisure society’. Our hypothesis is that keywords like ‘sustainable development’, ‘participation’ and ‘nature in the city’ are now becoming ‘mandatory’ in terms of promotion of urban projects but hide a certain instrumentalism of fashionable concepts. This is what we try to demonstrate through the case study of the Darsena di Milano (Italy), an urban port which has been the subject of various conversion projects after its decommissioning. This case, particularly representative of the possible discrepancy between displayed marketing and realised projects, is not an isolated case. In another extent, other project promoters encourage ‘soft’ or ‘eco-friendly’ characters, without having nor the means nor the ambition to give a real thickness to this aspect in the spatial realisation of urban projects.