Milan and its metropolitan region make up the largest, richest and most densely populated conurbation in Italy. Together they offer a unique opportunity to design a great, modern, well-connected city region, based on the principles of livability and sustainability. Efforts are now being focused on ensuring that the new Milanese region can boast good quality of life, a flexible and creative economy and strong appeal for investors, entrepreneurs, skills and knowledge.

The heart of the Milanese region is the province of Milan. The Provincial authorities coordinate and modulate development policies and organize services. The Milanese region spans out from the Lombard capital to embrace the provinces of Como, Lecco and Varese to the north; Novara to the west; Lodi and Pavia to the south; Bergamo to the east.

The web linking up this vast metropolitan consists, above all, of business and associated functional services. The restructuring and de-industrialization process that affected Milan and its hinterland in the Eighties and Nineties led, in fact, to the transformation of the city into a business and services centre. This paved the way for Milan’s affirmation as the international capital of Fashion and Design, as a city of knowledge and communication and as the centre of a network of activities serving a vast area with a population of over six million people.

The new regional scale of the metropolitan area is reflected in the figures regarding the daily movement of people and goods into Milan and out towards the edge of the Milanese region. Every day some two million workers crowd into the city while a further 400 thousand people travel out of the Milan for work or service reasons. With the development and re-qualification of industrial activities in numerous suburban municipalities, Milan now sprawls uninterruptedly, a huge polycentric conurbation that effectively involves the entire administrative area of the Province of Milan.

The Milanese region is also instantly recognizable thanks to large-scale infrastructure such as its airport network, Italy’s largest, and its exhibition system, which competes with Frankfurt for supremacy in Europe.