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This paper presents a participatory process aimed at improving outdoor education in a primary school in Milan. The rationale of this work was that the psycho-physical benefits for children from outdoor living could be enhanced through outdoor education. Indeed, open-air environments are fit for supporting learning experiences, bringing out different abilities and improving well-being. Moreover, during the COVID-19 pandemic, schoolyards turned out to be a resource for overcoming physical distancing. Nevertheless, the availability of flexible physical environments and proper equipment for the educational goals is a basic condition for overcoming difficulties in the extensive use of outdoor spaces in schools. The purpose of this work was to support the school in designing new outdoor educational environments with a focused vision on the pedagogical context. Thus, the process was developed by a multidisciplinary team with the involvement of the students and the teaching staff. By the initial analytical stage, site and use conditions as well as emerging needs were enlightened. These outcomes were assumed to develop a design solution both suitable for the innovation goals and attentive to environmental aspects. The proposal was selected for funding by the Municipality and implemented. Finally, a three-year post-occupancy evaluation program started in the earliest stages of use. In conclusion, by the first monitoring activities, it emerged that outdoor educational experiences increased and diversified from the past, together with students’ perception of opportunities and benefits achieved from more frequent and longer work in external environments, and their expectation of involvement in proposing further implementations.

The team, since the early stages of the project, has worked with the will to seize, in collaboration and multidisciplinary dialogue, an opportunity for cultural and scientific growth to achieve shared solutions. The regeneration of the area subject of this study has assumed four elementary actions as operational tools declined to the urban, architectural and technological scale: include, subtract, add and connect. In Tor Bella Monaca, the lack of sense of urbanity is the real cause of environmental discomfort. The size, the layout and the position of the large residential units deprive the inhabitants of a sense of belonging to the city that has been reformulated by reorganizing the greenery and by bringing the common equipment inside the large courtyards to reduce the size of the void. The goal was to achieve a balance between public and private different from the existing one. At the residential scale, it was necessary to return the different quality of domestic spaces. Reshaping the internal configuration, returning in the facade a new character to the building, allows buildings to show outside a new and more decent domestic quality, rewriting the relationship between private and public. The ground floor loses its residential character and progressively, from the bottom to the top, the character public disperses in favor of regained intimacy. The transformations are configured, moreover, as a wider system of connections, both material and immaterial, in which the art of composition and the building wisdom expressed by the technological solutions have found a congruent synthesis between economy, formal reconfiguration and new quality of daily life in the suburbs.

This paper describes the methodology of research and analy- sis that have been adopted in order to develop the targets of the project, along with the design proposal. A literature review about urban regeneration ad its best practices and a deep study of the various features and peculiarities of the area has been conducted. Such a study guided the definition of the criteria that must be ap- plied to develop the project. The proposal of urban regeneration aims to retrain the whole di- strict by retrofitting ENPAM’s buildings and industrial sheds by the railway as well as redesigning the public spaces and the green areas. The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. The first section overviews the state of art about urban regeneration, taking into account the theories, the regulations, and the best practices. The adopted methodology of analysis and the situation of the ur- ban sector is reported in the second section, as well as underlining critical issues and project requirements emerged. Design criteria and the project proposal is described in the third section.

L'articolo affronta un'analisi sulla duplice accezione dell’aggettivo smart, declinato in ambito energetico-ambientale e storico-culturale. La riqualificazione dei contesti urbani viene qui affrontata seguendo due filoni paralleli: da un lato, quello relativo agli aspetti della sostenibilità ambientale, verificata attraverso una lettura bioclimatica del luogo; dall'altro quello relativo alla rappresentazione di queste nuove città digitali. Si tratta di definire un approccio multidisciplinare, che interpola tecnologia e disegno, adottando nuovi mezzi di rappresentazione per la conoscenza multiscalare del patrimonio urbano. Una simile metodologia mira a individuare nell'ambiente costruito urbano di antico impianto i caratteri riferibili allo smart heritage: patrimonio architettonico “intelligente”, in quanto punto di forza della città del futuro. The article deals with the analysis of the double meaning of “smart” as adjective, declined in the energyenvironmental and historical-cultural field, the regeneration of urban contexts here is dealt following two parallel aspects: on the first hand, concerning the environmental sustainability, verified through a bioclimatic reading of the site; on the other hand, related to the representation of the new digital cities. Through this multidisciplinary approach, the technology and drawing are interpolated and new means of representation for multi-scale knowledge of urban heritage are implied. This methodology identifies main architectural elements that characterize the idea of “smart heritage” for the historic city.