If You Build an Eco-City, Will They Come?

Travel Blog  •  Joanna Kakissis  •  01.14.09 | 2:06 PM ET

Green is trendy, and the very fashion-minded Milan loves trends. So if all goes as planned, by 2013 a chic, eco-mini-city called Milano Santa Monica will open some seven kilometers outside Milan’s city center in a town called Segrate. If this place actually looks like the computer-generated images on its website, it’s going to be beautiful. Imagine two million square meters of lush green space with well-designed and energy-efficient apartments and shops, and a pedestrian mall with a waterway, parks and lots of trees.

Will Milano Santa Monica become the darlings of architects, environmentalists and eco-snobs, like the much-touted Bo01 neighborhood in the western harbor area of Malmo, Sweden (pictured)? (And will it also spin off a heated debate about identity and affordability among the Italians, as Bo01 did with the Swedes?) Or will it buckle under opposition from locals who doubt the efficacy of eco-towns, which have gotten a very icy reception in Great Britain?

I’m hoping those cities that broil every summer in urban heat islands, like my birth city of Athens, will at least adopt the blooming balconies and healthy parks part of the eco-town scheme. Cementopolises have never been so uncool, and the Athens mayor knows it.  (via Environmental Graffiti.)


Joanna Kakissis's writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Boston Globe and The Washington Post, among other publications. A contributor to the World Hum blog, she's currently a Ted Scripps fellow in environmental journalism at the University of Colorado in Boulder.


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