18.04.2019  11.45

Off Campus San Siro opens

New shared spaces in the city restore value for the common good

17 April saw the opening of Off Campus San Siro, the Politecnico di Milano’s new space that is open to the city. It is the first of a series of shared spaces that we plan to create with the aim of moving out of the Politecnico’s historical sites to become more deeply integrated into the area and be part of the huge transformations happening in our city. 

The Off Campuses will be physical spaces situated in various neighbourhoods throughout Milan, often in the suburbs, and will promote:

• innovative teaching for students and professors to develop new skills through working in real world settings
• responsible research aimed at developing inclusive knowledge production processes
• project co-design and development to directly support stakeholders and local communities

The project is promoted by Polisocial, the Politecnico di Milano’s social responsibility programme, a fundamental part of the university’s Third Mission. We want to build a new relationship between the Politecnico and the city, testing our teaching methods, immersing them in the local situation and connecting them to local places and people, in a huge, stimulating workshop. To do this we took inspiration from major experiments carried out abroad, such as those by Harvard University, the University of Sheffield and the University of Chicago.

The new 130m2 space provides a number of rooms for various activities:

• Urban room, a working space for project development, responsible research and innovative teaching
• Neighbourhood open archive
• Live-net, a meeting space for associations and other stakeholders
• Educult, a space for cultural and educational activities open to the neighbourhood and the city
• Neighbourhood bistro, a fully-equipped social space
• Legal clinic, a legal office providing education on legal matters, managed by the Università Bocconi

A schedule of events has also been planned which will be added to over time with seminars, open classes and neighbourhood meetings. We will shortly be publishing the dates of the first few events.

The Politecnico has been in the San Siro neighbourhood for a number of years and has developed projects that have been fundamental to establishing the new Off Campus. The action research workshop Mapping San Siro has been based in the neighbourhood since 2014 in a building named Trentametriquadri (Thirty square metres). WRP – West Road Project, winner of the Polisocial Award 2017, operates a system for activating networks and public spaces in the suburbs of zone 7. The educational programmes Ri-Formare Periferie Città Metropolitana (Re-forming the Metropolitan City Suburbs) and Envisioning San Siro by the School of Architecture Urban Planning Construction Engineering have focused on this area.

The establishment of Off Campus San Siro was made possible through the collaboration of various stakeholders and institutions: the City of Milan, the Lombardy Region, ALER Milano, Università Bocconi, the Cariplo Foundation, the Milan Community Foundation, the Cadorna and Radice neighbourhood schools, the local Sansheros network and a number of companies.