The City of Milan creates an office for street art: it will have to census and promote it

The Municipality of Milan has created the new “Art in Public Spaces” office, which follows up on the guidelines approved by the council in order to promote street art: the new office will thus have the task of taking a census of urban artworks in the city’s territory, checking their state of preservation and promoting street art through enhancement activities.

The city administration recognizes that street art, which originated and spread internationally as a spontaneous artistic language, has over time become an expressive form capable of actively involving the citizenry and has given new centrality to neighborhoods and the different identities that inhabit them. The municipality, therefore, recognizes it as an effective lever for the regeneration of public spaces and suburban neighborhoods. As early as September 2014, a resolution of the Milan City Council had initiated a path for the enhancement of urban art, pointing to it as an “important tool in the framework of the path of territorial enhancement, cultural and social development of the city,” and inviting the junta to open an ongoing dialogue with the world of artists and curators, including with the involvement of the City’s investee companies (ATM, MM and AMSA) so that they would promote artistic interventions on the surfaces they own.

The path that led to the birth of the new office then continued in 2015 when the city administration identified a series of “Free Walls” available for free expression in a self-managed form for the creation of street art, and again, in June 2019, it set up a working table made up of operators from the world of Milanese street art, who were given a pro bono assignment to identify the appropriate tools to enhance the interventions and facilitate their realization. And so now, within the Culture Directorate, the “Art in Public Spaces” office becomes operational, thanks to a resolution approved in the last few hours, with powers to oversee procedures related to newly created artworks within public spaces.

For the municipality, it is “another important step towards effective public coordination for the real promotion of street art is the exemption from the fee for the occupation of public spaces and areas (Cosap) for carried out with scaffolding (or caesars or other equipment) for the realization of artistic interventions on any surface,” as stated in a note.

The resolution giving operationalization to the “Art in Public Spaces” office also defines the competencies of the new body. Specifically, the office will have the task of taking a census of the works already present in the area, checking their state of preservation, communicating and enhancing them; promoting the realization of coordinated street art interventions; and publicizing two catalogs of walls belonging to the heritage of Public Housing Services of the Municipality of Milan, managed by MM Spa, the first concerning surfaces free from monumental or landscape constraints, and the second instead concerning surfaces subject to constraints; to coordinate the authorization procedures in collaboration with the other directorates, and also with the other institutions involved in the case of constrained walls; to encourage the involvement of citizens through the sharing of projects with the Municipalities, also through collaboration pacts between private Municipalities and Municipalities; to define, through a disciplinary-type, a standardized and simplified authorization procedure of surfaces for the benefit of street art so as to facilitate local operators in the preliminary investigation of requests for new projects.

The activity of the Office for “Art in Public Spaces” is therefore, concludes the Milan City Council’s note, “aimed at achieving the objectives set out in the document ’Milan 2020. Strategies for Adaptation,’ which considers the new use and management of outdoor public space as a fundamental element of response to the current situation of post-lockdown containment; but also to the aims of the plan for Milan 2030, which expresses the desire to transform the city’s connecting infrastructure, and therefore also the housing stock, into elements of urban, cultural and social reconnection.”

Pictured: the Garden of Cultures in Milan

The City of Milan creates an office for street art: it will have to census and promote it

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